Despite the fact that there have been a lot of studies undertaken analysing the most commonly employed words in the English language and producing lists ordering words by their supposed frequency, none of these lists can be genuinely definitive. This is because it would be impossible to analyse every example of English language in use today although many written texts can simply be obtained, it is difficult to collect numerous and varied sufficient samples of spoken language.

 

The list below was created by analysing the Oxford English Corpus, the really large set of texts used by the makers of the Oxford English Dictionary and by the Oxford University Press’ language analysis programme to carry out hypothesis testing and statistical analysis. This specific text corpus contains more than two billion words, originating from a wide range of sources, from specialist journals and literary novels to everyday magazines and newspapers and the language utilised in weblogs, emails and chatrooms. The list is also representative of a study undertaken by Oxford On-line, in association with the Oxford English Dictionary.

 

It is important to note that many of the words listed are lemmas that is, they in fact represent more than one word. For example, the item “be”, as the base form of a verb, also consists of all the occurrences of “are”, “be”, “was” and “is”.

 

According to this study, therefore, the ten most typical words in the English language are “the”, “be”, “to”, “of”, “and”, “a”, “in”, “that”, “have” and “I” respectively. Prepositions are particularly common, with “for”, “on”, “with”, “at”, “by”, “from”, “up”, “out”, “into”, and “over” also appearing in the leading one hundred most frequent words.

 

Conjunctions also appear often, with “as”, “but”, “or”, “also” and “since”, as properly as “and” in the top 1 hundred. The other most frequent word class is pronouns, the most typical examples of which, soon after “I”, are “it”, “he”, “you”, “this”, “his”, “they”, “we”, “her”, “she” and “my”, which is only number 34. Amazingly, the items in this list of the one hundred most commonly used English words make up fifty percent of all the words in the Oxford English Corpus.

 

The ten most generally employed nouns are “time”, “individual”, “year”, “way”, “day”, “factor”, “man”, “world”, “life” and “hand” respectively, even though the most frequent verbs are “be”, “have”, “do”, “eat”, “sleep”, “drink”, “put”, “keep”, “run” and “walk”. The ten adjectives used most regularly, according to this study, are “very good”, “very first”, “new”, “last”, “lengthy”, “excellent”, “little”, “own”, “other” and “old”.

 

Interestingly, this list of the English language’s most generally employed words is not as readily subject to alter as one may possibly think. Even though adjustments in society and culture and ever increasing globalisation are constantly shaping and changing our language and forcing our vocabulary and linguistic habits to evolve, most of the most frequently utilized words are those that are timeless or are functional words, such as pronouns, which have no need to be altered.

 

Indeed, even though most of the words constituting today’s English language do not have Old English roots, but stem from other languages brought over by invaders all through the history of the language’s development, practically all of the 1 hundred most regularly utilised words do indeed come from Old English. Whilst, for example, words such as “telegram” are ultimately bound to die out, the commonly utilised “year”, “world” and “life” are far from redundant.

Oxford University Online