English for Students

Frequently Used Nouns in English

What are the most Frequently Used Nouns in English?

The commonest nouns are time, person and year followed by way and day (month is 40th). The majority of the top 25 nouns (15) are from Old English and of the remainder most came into medieval English from Old French and before that from Latin. The exception is group (French from Italian) which did not appear until the 17th century.


Notice that many of these words are very common because they have more than one meaning: way and part, for example, are listed in this dictionary as having 18 and 16 different meanings respectively. Another reason for a word's high position on the list is that it forms part of many common phrases:

For Example: Most of the frequency of time comes from adverbial phrases like on time, in time, last time, next time, this time, etc.

The Most Frequently Used Words ( NOUNS ) are:

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



A look at some pairs or groups of words makes interesting reading:

• man is 7th, whereas child is 12th and woman 14th
• the highest-ranking body part, hand, is 10th - eye is the next in 13th place, followed by head at 27
• Work is at number 16 whereas play and rest do not feature in the top 100!
• war is at 49 with no sign of peace
• problem is 24th and there is no solution in sight
• friend is 30th with no enemy or foe
• book is number 41 whereas computer does not feature in the top 100 and is below paper
• Money is surprisingly low at 65 and cash is nowhere to be seen: this low ranking is perhaps explained by the fact that we have so many synonyms for money.





Frequently Used Verbs
Frequently Used Adjectives