English for Students

Frequently Used Adjectives in English

What are the most Frequently Used Adjectives in English?

Again, most of the top adjectives are one-syllable words and 17 out of 25 are from Old English. Only different, large and important are from Latin. In terms of the words' meanings great is higher in the ranking than big probably because of its informal sense very good. Little is surprisingly high at 7 as compared with small at 15. Bad is unexpectedly low at 23: is this because we have such a large choice of synonyms available for expressing bad things?

The Most Frequently Used Words ( ADJECTIVES ) are:

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



It is noticeable that many of the most frequently used words are short ones whose main purpose is to join other longer words rather than determine the meaning of a sentence. The Oxford English Corpus is a collection of real twenty-first century English and is a major part of the Oxford Language Research Programme. Its research findings are used to write and revise Oxford dictionaries, including the latest revised edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.


Frequently Used Nouns
Frequently Used Verbs