This paper reviews "The American Heritage Word Frequency Book" by John B. Carroll, Peter Davis, and Barry Richman (CDR). CDR is a word frequency count derived from school books for children in grades 3-9. Included in this review are an explanation of the development of CDR and a guide to its practical use. The guide can be used independently of the rest of the paper. Comments are also on the usefulness of CDR for compilation of the Communication Skills Lexicon. Finally, various word frequency counts and frequency measures are compared and discussed in terms of their utility for assigning frequency values to words in the lexicon. (Author)