Hi Juxta,
I'm very familiar with the English corpus concept. Glad you raised this topic. Apart from the T-E & E-T Translations, I'm also excited to join you on this.
According to my favorite dictionary, Collins COBUILD, the most frequently used words in English are called "collocation" or "frequent English word combinations." A few years ago, there were 140,000 English collocations. COBUILD extracted those collocations from its unique "corpus" of 200 million English words. However, "
in January 2002 the latest release of the corpus amounted to 450 million words and it continues to grow with the constant addition of new material" (Bank of English)
Macmillan English Dictionary stated that: "
The most frequently used 7,500 words in English make up about 90 percent of all the language that you will ever come across. Eighty percent of the time we use only 2,500 words" (Gwyneth Fox, Associate Editor, Macmillan English Dictionary -- from this URL).
Now I'll take a break from this Message Boards Reply-athon and will come back to post (some of) the most frequesntly used Thai words. Stay tuned.