See this site, WORDCOUNT/Tracking the Way We Use Language, which was mentioned on the Humanist mailing list. I don’t know if it really “tracks the way we use language” per se; I mean, what it does is rank the 86,800 most commonly used words and displays them in order of commonality– “the” is number one, “composition” is 3827, and “rhetoric” is 7256, and “conquistador” was 86,800. It was fun coming up with words not in the list, too. Very cool interface and design.
Writer, Professor, and Everything Else