Most common

words in English

St udies t hat est imat e and rank t he most common words in English examine t ext s writ t en in
English. Perhaps t he most comprehensive such analysis is one t hat was conduct ed against t he
Oxford English Corpus (OEC), a massive t ext corpus t hat is writ t en in t he English language.

In t ot al, t he t ext s in t he Oxford English Corpus cont ain more t han 2 billion words.[1] The OEC
includes a wide variet y of writ ing samples, such as lit erary works, novels, academic journals,
newspapers, magazines, Hansard's Parliament ary Debat es, blogs, chat logs, and emails.[2]

Anot her English corpus t hat has been used t o st udy word frequency is t he Brown Corpus, which
was compiled by researchers at Brown Universit y in t he 1960s. The researchers published t heir
analysis of t he Brown Corpus in 1967. Their findings were similar, but not ident ical, t o t he findings
of t he OEC analysis.

According t o The Reading Teacher's Book of Lists, t he first 25 words in t he OEC make up about
one-t hird of all print ed mat erial in English, and t he first 100 words make up about half of all
writ t en English.[3] According t o a st udy cit ed by Robert McCrum in The Story of English, all of t he
first hundred of t he most common words in English are of Anglo-Saxon origin,[4] except for
"people", ult imat ely from Lat in "populus", and "because", in part from Lat in "causa".

Some list s of common words dist inguish bet ween word forms, while ot hers rank all forms of a
word as a single lexeme (t he form of t he word as it would appear in a dict ionary). For example,
t he lexeme be (as in to be) comprises all it s conjugat ions (is, was, am, are, were, et c.), and
cont ract ions of t hose conjugat ions.[5] These t op 100 lemmas list ed below account for 50% of all
t he words in t he Oxford English Corpus.[1]

100 most common words

See also

References

External links

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