SUBTLEX-UK: a new and improved word frequency database for British English

We present word frequencies based on subtitles of British television programmes. We show that theSUBTLEX-UK word frequencies explain more of the variance in the lexical decision times ofthe British Lexicon Project than the word frequencies based on the British National Corpus and theSUBTLEX-US frequencies. In addition to the word form frequencies, we also present measures of contextualdiversity part-of-speech specific word frequencies, word frequencies in children programmes,and word bigram frequencies, giving researchers of British English access to the full range of normsrecently made available for other languages. Finally, we introduce a new measure of word frequency,the Zipf scale, which we hope will stop the current misunderstandings of the word frequency effect