I found a link to the 1000 most common words in written English broken down into groups of 100.
The list is from WEB Dubois Learning Center website via their
Education Watch Program (
www.duboislc.org), and the list is
HERE.
Or, you can try this
really cool thing: you can type in a word you think of and find its frequency rank at
www.wordcount.org which has used over 86,000 words from the British National Corpus (which has 100 million words). This is a really fun tool.
Happy searching.
Karen