Count it yourself

You can do what the word-game makers did with nothing but a page and a pencil. Pick one page of any book. Make a tally mark for each word as you read it, one row per different word.

A few small words will run away with the count — the, and, a, of, to. Most other words turn up once. The top word usually has about twice as many marks as the second, and the third about a third as many as the first: Zipf noticed this pattern in many languages.

Do it on two pages of different books and compare your lists. The small words stay at the top; the interesting words change with the book.