Hacker News Reader

That wasn't the point.

And I actually played a version of the tambur as a kid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamburica

That was the point, your suggestion was that it was either an uncanny coincidence (really?) or someone you know. My contention was that as a word that returns two and a half million results on Google, it was obviously neither.

Two and a half million results doesn't make this word very common at all. Even "frolicking" returns twice that.

Besides, looking through the first two pages of those results, most are people's last names.

"Even" frolicking? Frolicking is a pretty common word. If it was called frolicking.io and you knew someone who went by the username, you would similarly assume it was either an uncanny coincidence or it was that person you knew?

Thank you, both of you, for such a relevant and intellectually stimulating discussion.

Blame the lack of a downvote button on my account.

Probably not because it's a verb. But I might, because finding small relationships between things makes life more interesting.

And now I'm very intrigued if there's a database of all or most english words ranked by their frequency. Something like the full Oxford English Dictionary, but with frequency ranks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com