Thanks Kyle - This is a great answer although I was naively hoping to keep everything in Mathematica :)
Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English: Based on the British National Corpus. Pearson ESL, 2001
This is interesting because the Wolfram|Alpha Data goes to 2007'sh and can be downloaded.
Alternatively, you can also download Googles ngrams datasets to gain information about word frequency...
The ngram datasets are something I looked at earlier, however:
- I could not verify the data against Wolfram|Alpha's
- Some quick sanity tests did not pass (not for this forum)
I was very much led astray by a crumb in the People & History Reference Guide
Very helpful!