Word Frequency Lists and Keyword Analysis

A wordlist is simply a list of all the words in a text, and the frequency of each word.

Keywords (in WordSmith at least) are the words in the text which are unusually frequent.

Making a wordlist or doing a keyword analysis can be quite useful for various linguistic activities: e.g. language teaching, stylistics, content analysis, forensic linguistics, and information retrieval. The data tell us frequency information about the vocabulary of the text as a whole -- unlike concordances, which focus on individual words and phrases at the level of the sentence or paragraph.