the basis for a word bank is a dozen novels from Project Gutenberg.
there are a few things to adjust for 💡 the boilerplate text, page numbers, chapter titles, tables of contents but nothing too difficult.
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as far as "names" are concerned - the capitalization (and the spikes in frequency 🔥 "Harry" is far more common a word in Harry Potter than in Gulliver's Travels ) should distinguish them.
💡 names are often polysemous. Autumn fell in the woods. - is it a person or a season? Georgia was beautiful - is it a person, a state, or a country? this ... is fine.
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we then have a few hundred "grammatical" words. what does the word for mean? or with? how can you explain that without circular definitions? you probably can't.
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by word frequency 250, we get words like open, together, seem, next. Still polysemous, still sometimes used in a grammatical way. But, generally, words with a definition that can be done in simpler words.
by word frequency 500, we get words like hot, bed, and thousand. words that can be defined, but might use less-common words. 💡 I don't have a perfect list yet. But bed may-or-may-not be more common than sleep.
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past that point, it is a flood of nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
at word frequency 1000, we get improve, sign, magazine. words that are polysemous, but easier to define.
at word frequency 4000, we are at coordinate, canvas, and combat. a purely-linear ranking may no longer be meaningful. the type of corpus will matter too much for there to be a fully well-ordered list.
i don't have a good enough list for word frequency 10000 to say anything definitive. perhaps moss, alloy, and paintball will show up here.
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we also have to deal with conjugation somewhere around here. are democracy and democratic one word 💡 the term lemma is used sometimes, but I don't like it or two?
also, are terms like bow (of a ship) and bow (gesture of respect) and bow (for string instruments) separate words?