Commonest English Words

What are the Commonest English Words?


The only way to measure this is to analyse a large collection (or corpus) of texts, but lists based on different collections (or corpora) tend to disagree about even the top ten words in English. A rough top twenty five based on the Oxford English Corpus might look something like this:


The, is, of, and, a, in, that, you, have, I, it, for, be, not, with, he, as, do, at, this, his, by, from, her, say


But you, for example, comes 8th in a list derived from the American Heritage corpus (Carroll et al, 1971), 12th in a list based on the British National Corpus, 32nd in a list based on the LOB (Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen) corpus (Hofland & Johansson 1982) and 33rd in a list based on the Brown corpus (Francis & Kucera 1982).


See also our section on The Most Frequently Used Words in English.


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