Most common words in English

Studies that estimate and rank the most common words in English examine texts written in English. Perhaps the most comprehensive such analysis is one that was conducted against the Oxford English Corpus (OEC), a very large collection of texts from around the world that are written in the English language. A text corpus is a large collection of written works that are organised in a way that makes such analysis easier.

In total, the texts in the Oxford English Corpus contain more than 2 billion words.[1] The OEC includes a wide variety of writing samples, such as literary works, novels, academic journals, newspapers, magazines, Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, blogs, chat logs, and emails.[2]

Another English corpus that has been used to study word frequency is the Brown Corpus, which was compiled by researchers at Brown University in the 1960s. The researchers published their analysis of the Brown Corpus in 1967. Their findings were similar, but not identical, to the findings of the OEC analysis.

According to The Reading Teacher's Book of Lists, the first 25 words in the OEC make up about one-third of all printed material in English, and the first 100 words make up about half of all written English.[3] According to a study cited by Robert McCrum in The Story of English, all of the first hundred of the most common words in English are of Anglo-Saxon origin, [4] except for "people", ultimately from Latin "populus", and "because", in part from Latin "causa".

Some lists of common words distinguish between word forms, while others rank all forms of a word as a single lexeme (the form of the word as it would appear in a dictionary). For example, the lexeme be (as in to be) comprises all its conjugations (is, was, are, were, etc.), and contractions of those conjugations.[5] Note also that these top 100 lemmas listed below account for 50% of all the words in the Oxford English Corpus.[1]

100 most common words

A list of 100 words that occur most frequently in written English is given below, based on an analysis of the Oxford English Corpus (a collection of texts in the English language, comprising over 2 billion running words).[1] A part of speech is provided for most of the words, but part of speech categories vary between analyses, and not all possibilities are listed. For example "I" may be a pronoun or a Roman numeral; "to" may be a preposition or an infinitive marker; "time" may be a noun or a verb. Also, a single spelling can represent more than one root word. For example "singer" may be a form of either "sing" or "singe". Different corpora may treat such difference differently.

The table also includes frequencies from other corpora, note that as well as usage differences, lemmatisation may differ from corpus to corpus - for example splitting the prepositional use of "to" from the use as a particle. Also the COCA list includes dispersion as well as frequency to calculate rank.

WordParts of speechOEC rankCOCA rank[6]Dolch level
theArticle11Pre-primer
beVerb22primer
toPreposition37, 9Pre-primer
ofPreposition44Grade 1
andConjunction53Pre-primer
aArticle65Pre-primer
inPreposition76, 128, 3038Pre-primer
thatConjunction et al.812, 27, 903primer
haveVerb98primer
IPronoun1011Pre-primer
itPronoun1110Pre-primer
forPreposition1213, 2339Pre-primer
notAdverb et al.1328, 2929Pre-primer
onPreposition1417, 155primer
withPreposition1516primer
hePronoun1615primer
asAdverb, conjunction, et al.1733, 49, 129Grade 1
youPronoun1814Pre-primer
doVerb, noun1918primer
atPreposition2022primer
thisDeterminer, adverb, noun2120, 4665primer
butPreposition, adverb, conjunction2223, 1715primer
hisPossessive pronoun2325, 1887Grade 1
byPreposition2430, 1190Grade 1
fromPreposition2526Grade 1
theyPronoun2621primer
wePronoun2724Pre-primer
sayVerb et al.2819primer
herPossessive pronoun29, 10642Grade 1
shePronoun3031primer
orConjunction3132Grade 2
anArticle32(a)Grade 1
willVerb, noun3348, 1506primer
myPossessive pronoun3444Pre-primer
oneNoun, adjective, et al.3551, 104, 839Pre-primer
allAdjective3643, 222primer
wouldVerb3741Grade 2
thereAdverb, pronoun, et al.3853, 116primer
theirPossessive pronoun3936Grade 2
whatPronoun, adverb, et al.4034primer
soConjunction, adverb, et al.4155, 196primer
upAdverb, preposition, et al.4250, 456Pre-primer
outPreposition4364, 149primer
ifConjunction4440Grade 3
aboutPreposition, adverb, et al.4546, 179Grade 3
whoPronoun, noun4638primer
getVerb4739primer
which4858Grade 2
goVerb, noun4935Pre-primer
mePronoun5061Pre-primer
when5157, 136Grade 1
makeVerb, noun5245
can5337, 2973
like5474, 208, 1123, 1684, 2702
time5552
no5693, 699, 916, 1111, 4555
justAdjective5766, 1823
himPronoun5868
knowVerb, noun5947
takeVerb, noun6063
peopleNoun6162
into6265
yearNoun6354
yourPossessive pronoun6469
goodAdjective65110, 2280
some6660
couldVerb6771
them6859
seeVerb6967
other7075, 715, 2355
than7173, 712
then7277
now7372, 1906
lookVerb7485, 604
only75101, 329
comeVerb7670
itsPossessive pronoun7778
overPreposition78124, 182
think7956
also8087
back81108, 323, 1877
afterPreposition82120, 260
useVerb, noun8392, 429
two8480
how8576
ourPossessive pronoun8679
workVerb, noun87117, 199
first8886, 2064
wellAdverb89100, 644
way9084, 4090
even91107, 484
newAdjective et al.9288
want9383
because9489, 509
any95109, 4720
these9682
giveVerb9798
day9890
most99144, 187
usPronoun100113

Parts of speech

The following is the same list subdivided by part of speech.[1] The list labeled "Others" includes pronouns, possessives, articles, modal verbs, adverbs, and conjunctions.

Nouns

  1. time
  2. person
  3. year
  4. way
  5. day
  6. thing
  7. man
  8. world
  9. life
  10. hand
  11. part
  12. child
  13. eye
  14. woman
  15. place
  16. work
  17. week
  18. case
  19. point
  20. government
  21. company
  22. number
  23. group
  24. problem
  25. fact

Verbs

  1. be
  2. have
  3. do
  4. say
  5. get
  6. make
  7. go
  8. know
  9. take
  10. see
  11. come
  12. think
  13. look
  14. want
  15. give
  16. use
  17. find
  18. tell
  19. ask
  20. work
  21. seem
  22. feel
  23. try
  24. leave
  25. call

Adjectives

  1. good
  2. new
  3. first
  4. last
  5. long
  6. great
  7. little
  8. own
  9. other
  10. old
  11. right
  12. big
  13. high
  14. different
  15. small
  16. large
  17. next
  18. early
  19. young
  20. important
  21. few
  22. public
  23. bad
  24. same
  25. able

Prepositions

  1. to
  2. of
  3. in
  4. for
  5. on
  6. with
  7. at
  8. by
  9. from
  10. up
  11. about
  12. into
  13. over
  14. after

Others

  1. the
  2. and
  3. a
  4. that
  5. I
  6. it
  7. not
  8. he
  9. as
  10. you
  11. this
  12. but
  13. his
  14. they
  15. her
  16. she
  17. or
  18. an
  19. will
  20. my
  21. one
  22. all
  23. would
  24. there
  25. their

See also

Word lists

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "The Oxford English Corpus: Facts about the language". OxfordDictionaries.com. Oxford University Press. What is the commonest word?. Archived from the original on December 26, 2011. Retrieved June 22, 2011.
  2. ↑ "The Oxford English Corpus". AskOxford.com. Retrieved June 22, 2006.
  3. ↑ The First 100 Most Commonly Used English Words.
  4. ↑ Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, Harper Perennial, 2001, page 58
  5. ↑ Benjamin Zimmer. June 22, 2006. Time after time after time.... Language Log. Retrieved June 22, 2006.
  6. ↑ "Word frequency: based on 450 million word COCA corpus". www.wordfrequency.info. Retrieved 11 April 2018.
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