Existing dictionaries of popular words to help solve a random substitution cipher? I'm trying to find faster ways to solve this:
http://cryptogram.org/solve_cipher.html

Actually lists of common words are good, but they are often limited to 1000 words.

I found this, but I'm not sure which one to use, but the word list still seems too large.

Do you know lists of 10k, 20k, 30k words, or tools that sorts words by popularity?
One nice way to generate a word list is distilling it from a large amount of texts.

There are a few interesting effects with this creation method:


The word frequency depends a lot on the chosen texts. For example when feeding it wikipedia the language is rather formal, and common every-day words are pretty rare. It might be interesting to compare Simple Wikipedia with the normal wikipedia
For some texts you also get common misspelling of words. That's nice for some uses, but bad if you want to use the list for spell checking. Should be fine in your case


I found a nice wordlist created from the english wikipedia which lists the words ordered by frequency. So you can truncate it if you want fewer words. Unfortunately it doesn't contain the frequency of each word, but since the source is available, adding this feature shouldn't be hard.