First most spoken english word

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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 massive text corpus that is written in the English language.

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 Old English 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, am, are, were, etc.), and contractions of those conjugations.^[5] 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 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 number of distinct senses that are listed in Wiktionary is shown in the polysemy column. For example, «out» can refer to an escape, a removal from play in baseball, or any of 36 other concepts. On average, each word in the list has 15.38 senses. The sense count does not include the use of terms in phrasal verbs such as «put out» (as in «inconvenienced») and other multiword expressions such as the interjection «get out!», where the word «out» does not have an individual meaning.^[6] As an example, «out» occurs in at least 560 phrasal verbs^[7] and appears in nearly 1700 multiword expressions.^[8]

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 Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) list includes dispersion as well as frequency to calculate rank.

Word	Parts of speech	OEC rank	COCA rank^[9]	Dolch level	Polysemy
the	Article	1	1	Pre-primer	12
be	Verb	2	2	Primer	21
to	Preposition	3	7, 9	Pre-primer	17
of	Preposition	4	4	Grade 1	12
and	Conjunction	5	3	Pre-primer	16
a	Article	6	5	Pre-primer	20
in	Preposition	7	6, 128, 3038	Pre-primer	23
that	Conjunction et al.	8	12, 27, 903	Primer	17
have	Verb	9	8	Primer	25
I	Pronoun	10	11	Pre-primer	7
it	Pronoun	11	10	Pre-primer	18
for	Preposition	12	13, 2339	Pre-primer	19
not	Adverb et al.	13	28, 2929	Pre-primer	5
on	Preposition	14	17, 155	Primer	43
with	Preposition	15	16	Primer	11
he	Pronoun	16	15	Primer	7
as	Adverb, conjunction, et al.	17	33, 49, 129	Grade 1	17
you	Pronoun	18	14	Pre-primer	9
do	Verb, noun	19	18	Primer	38
at	Preposition	20	22	Primer	14
this	Determiner, adverb, noun	21	20, 4665	Primer	9
but	Preposition, adverb, conjunction	22	23, 1715	Primer	17
his	Possessive pronoun	23	25, 1887	Grade 1	6
by	Preposition	24	30, 1190	Grade 1	19
from	Preposition	25	26	Grade 1	4
they	Pronoun	26	21	Primer	6
we	Pronoun	27	24	Pre-primer	6
say	Verb et al.	28	19	Primer	17
her	Possessive pronoun	29, 106	42	Grade 1	3
she	Pronoun	30	31	Primer	7
or	Conjunction	31	32	Grade 2	11
an	Article	32	(a)	Grade 1	6
will	Verb, noun	33	48, 1506	Primer	16
my	Possessive pronoun	34	44	Pre-primer	5
one	Noun, adjective, et al.	35	51, 104, 839	Pre-primer	24
all	Adjective	36	43, 222	Primer	15
would	Verb	37	41	Grade 2	13
there	Adverb, pronoun, et al.	38	53, 116	Primer	14
their	Possessive pronoun	39	36	Grade 2	2
what	Pronoun, adverb, et al.	40	34	Primer	19
so	Conjunction, adverb, et al.	41	55, 196	Primer	18
up	Adverb, preposition, et al.	42	50, 456	Pre-primer	50
out	Preposition	43	64, 149	Primer	38
if	Conjunction	44	40	Grade 3	9
about	Preposition, adverb, et al.	45	46, 179	Grade 3	18
who	Pronoun, noun	46	38	Primer	5
get	Verb	47	39	Primer	37
which	Pronoun	48	58	Grade 2	7
go	Verb, noun	49	35	Pre-primer	54
me	Pronoun	50	61	Pre-primer	10
when	Adverb	51	57, 136	Grade 1	11
make	Verb, noun	52	45	Grade 2 [as «made»]	48
can	Verb, noun	53	37, 2973	Pre-primer	18
like	Preposition, verb	54	74, 208, 1123, 1684, 2702	Primer	26
time	Noun	55	52	Dolch list of 95 nouns	14
no	Determiner, adverb	56	93, 699, 916, 1111, 4555	Primer	10
just	Adjective	57	66, 1823		14
him	Pronoun	58	68		5
know	Verb, noun	59	47		13
take	Verb, noun	60	63		66
people	Noun	61	62		9
into	Preposition	62	65		10
year	Noun	63	54		7
your	Possessive pronoun	64	69		4
good	Adjective	65	110, 2280		32
some	Determiner, pronoun	66	60		10
could	Verb	67	71		6
them	Pronoun	68	59		3
see	Verb	69	67		25
other	Adjective, pronoun	70	75, 715, 2355		12
than	Conjunction, preposition	71	73, 712		4
then	Adverb	72	77		10
now	Preposition	73	72, 1906		13
look	Verb	74	85, 604		17
only	Adverb	75	101, 329		11
come	Verb	76	70		20
its	Possessive pronoun	77	78		2
over	Preposition	78	124, 182		19
think	Verb	79	56		10
also	Adverb	80	87		2
back	Noun, adverb	81	108, 323, 1877		36
after	Preposition	82	120, 260		14
use	Verb, noun	83	92, 429		17
two	Noun	84	80		6
how	Adverb	85	76		11
our	Possessive pronoun	86	79		3
work	Verb, noun	87	117, 199		28
first	Adjective	88	86, 2064		10
well	Adverb	89	100, 644		30
way	Noun, adverb	90	84, 4090		16
even	Adjective	91	107, 484		23
new	Adjective et al.	92	88		18
want	Verb	93	83		10
because	Conjunction	94	89, 509		7
any	Pronoun	95	109, 4720		4
these	Pronoun	96	82		2
give	Verb	97	98		19
day	Noun	98	90		9
most	Adverb	99	144, 187		12
us	Pronoun	100	113		6

Parts of speech

The following is a very similar list, subdivided by part of speech.^[1] The list labeled «Others» includes pronouns, possessives, articles, modal verbs, adverbs, and conjunctions.

Rank	Nouns	Verbs	Adjectives	Prepositions	Others
1	time	be	good	to	the
2	person	have	new	of	and
3	year	do	first	in	a
4	way	say	last	for	that
5	day	get	long	on	I
6	thing	make	great	with	it
7	man	go	little	at	not
8	world	know	own	by	he
9	life	take	other	from	as
10	hand	see	old	up	you
11	part	come	right	about	this
12	child	think	big	into	but
13	eye	look	high	over	his
14	woman	want	different	after	they
15	place	give	small		her
16	work	use	large		she
17	week	find	next		or
18	case	tell	early		an
19	point	ask	young		will
20	government	work	important		my
21	company	seem	few		one
22	number	feel	public		all
23	group	try	bad		would
24	problem	leave	same		there
25	fact	call	able		their

References

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d «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.
^ «The Oxford English Corpus». AskOxford.com. Archived from the original on May 4, 2006. Retrieved June 22, 2006.
^ The First 100 Most Commonly Used English Words Archived 2013-06-16 at the Wayback Machine.
^ Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, Harper Perennial, 2001, page 58
^ Benjamin Zimmer. June 22, 2006. Time after time after time…. Language Log. Retrieved June 22, 2006.
^ Benjamin, Martin (2019). «Polysemy in top 100 Oxford English Corpus words within Wiktionary». Teach You Backwards. Retrieved December 28, 2019.
^ Garcia-Vega, M (2010). «Teasing out the meaning of «out»«. 29th International Conference on Lexis and Grammar.
^ «out — English-French Dictionary». www.wordreference.com. Retrieved November 22, 2022.
^ «Word frequency: based on 450 million word COCA corpus». www.wordfrequency.info. Retrieved April 11, 2018.

External links

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Modern English is a conglomerate of vocabulary from many different languages and varies widely depending on the country it’s spoken it. Even still, there are a few common words and phrases that English speakers around the globe use on the regular. If you’re learning English, this is a helpful list to refer to for foundational vocabulary.

Words English speakers say all the time

More than 840 million people speak English as their first or second language, which makes it the second most-spoken language in the world after Chinese Mandarin. So if you’re in the process of learning English, don’t fret – many people have successfully done it! And once you learn to speak, you’ll have a world of opportunities and new people you can communicate with.

As with any language, learning English starts with learning the basics: vocabulary. So that you know which ones to prioritise, I’ve broken the most commonly spoken words into different categories.

Pronouns

The majority of sentences in English start with a pronoun to clarify who is the subject. These are:

I
you
he/she/it
we
they

To mention something important about “you”: some languages such as German have different words for formal vs informal you (“Sie” for formal and “du” for informal). In English, we only have the word “you” for both situations, but we do distinguish them by using particular words and being more polite.

Common verbs in English

After each subject, then comes a verb. Here are some of the most common verbs in English:

get
have
be
to
do
make
say
talk
walk
go
eat
sleep
work
read
ask
help
know
would
could
can
should
need
feel
become
leave
come
start
stop

“Get” is infamous for being one of the most flexible words in the whole English language. How you use it depends entirely on the context. To give you a better idea, here are a few examples:

Can you please get me a coffee? (Here “get” means either bring or make.)
I totally get you, that makes sense. (Here “get” means understand.)
I heard someone knocking. Can you please get the door? (Here “get” means open.)
He got the gift instead of his sister. (Here “get” means receive.)
I have to get home now, it’s so late! (Here “get” means go.)

For nearly every circumstance, there are alternative verbs for “get”, but if you want to truly sound like a native English speaker, using “get” is much more commonly used, especially when speaking.

Nouns

Nouns are used to describe a person, place. or thing. A few of the most common English nouns are:

thing
people
woman
man
child
family
dog
cat
door
window
table
chair
kitchen
bed
blanket
dishes
towel
shoes
socks
pants
shirt
dress
floor
food
drinks
water

My biggest recommendation for learning English nouns is to make sticky notes around the house for each item. Then each time you look at it, you’re reminded of that word. Because you start learning vocabulary according to your surroundings, they’re more familiar and become easier to memorise.

Another pro tip: if you don’t know the word for a noun when speaking to someone, just refer to it as “thing” and try to describe it. Honestly even native English speakers do this all the time when we’re feeling lazy!

Question words

When you want to transform your sentence into a question, you’ll often begin with a question word. Here is a quick overview of English question words:

why
where
who
how
when
which
whose
what

Prepositions in English

Prepositions are another essential element of English grammar, because they are combined with many other words to form phrases. The most common prepositions are:

to
in
out
for
with
on
since
at
until
by
as
about
into
between
against

When I worked as an English teacher, one of the most commonly asked questions about prepositions was the difference between until and by in the context of due dates. Here is an example to clarify:

The students need to turn in their homework by Monday. (Here we’re only stating the fixed deadline.)
The students have until Monday to turn in their homework. (Here we’re talking about the total time period up until the deadline.)

English Adjectives

Adjectives are the spices of language and English is no exception. Here are a few of the most commonly used adjectives:

awesome
wonderful
easy
difficult
hard
big
small
beautiful
cool
new
old
pretty
fantastic

By the way, if you’re speaking with an American, always go for the word “awesome”. I am one myself and we use it constantly (probably too much haha).

Miscellaneous English words

There are some popular, miscellaneous filler words that are important to keep in mind as well:

like
and
but
so
well
too
just
more
this
that
because
very
even
quite
may
maybe
another
few
here
there

A quick note on “like”: if you’ve watched American TV series like Friends, The Big Bang Theory, or Family Guy, you’ll notice that they use the word “like” all the time. It’s one of the words that is basically pure slang and has a few different meanings. A few examples are:

I was talking to my friend and he was like “I had such a bad day yesterday”. (Here “like” is another word for “said” and it’s often used in the context of telling a story of a previous conversation.)
I spoke to my sister yesterday and she was like seriously tired after working so much. (Here “like” means really, as in to emphasise the tiredness.)
I talked to my boss yesterday to ask for a day off and he said no. Like, how could he be so mean? (Here “like” emphasises the surprising element of the other person’s response.)

In the same manner as “get”, this is another word that becomes clear once you hear how others use it and you become more advanced in your speaking skills.

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By Robby

If you are new here please read this first.

Many of my fellow foreigners arrive to my blog while searching for the most commonly used English words, and there’s a good chance that you may be one of them!

‘The top 100 most commonly used English words’, ‘top 500 English words’, ‘English word frequency lists’ – such and similar keywords are used by thousands of foreign English speakers eager to improve their English fluency.

But are these English word lists any good? Do they offer good value in terms of improving one’s ability to speak fluently?

Frankly speaking, such frequency lists don’t provide a lot of practical value – if any!

Why?

Fair enough – give me a few moments and I’ll show you exactly why! 😉

English Word Frequency Lists Only Satisfy Our Curiosity – They’re NO GOOD for Anything ELSE!

Please follow this link for a list of 100 most common words in English. Now, scan the list and tell me if you found a single word you DIDN’T KNOW.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I can say the following with the utmost certainty – “Among the top 100 most common English words there’s not a single one you didn’t know!”

Yes, the fact that these hundred words make up about a half of all written English material is astonishing, and it’s a typical 80/20 rule in action. 2000 General Service List Words account for 95% vocabulary used in daily conversations, for example, and it just goes to show that one doesn’t need to build MASSIVE vocabulary consisting of thousands upon thousands of words to be an efficient English communicator.

Sorry – Word Lists Are Good for SOMETHING – They Teach Us Not to Waste Our Time!

As I said – the fact that a relatively small number of individual words account for large volume of words in usage serves as a reminder that we don’t need to dedicate our lives to building insanely large English vocabulary.

That’s exactly what I was doing years ago, and among useful words I wrote in my pocket dictionary there were quite obscure specimens I’ve NEVER heard of in my later life – let alone used them!

So I have to admit that this is one aspect of those word frequency lists that does have a benefit. Namely, it highlights the importance of focusing on the essential vocabulary thus accelerating the learning curve.

Other than that, however, those lists are rather misleading because they create the impression that you can learn individual words, stick them together, and – presto! – you can communicate effectively and fluently.

Sorry guys, it just doesn’t happen like that, and the reason for that is quite simple:

It’s the Word Combinations that Matter – not Separate Words and Word Lists!

Now I’ll do a small experiment. I’ll google up the General Service List words and copy a small section of them to see how good they are for using in our daily conversations.

So here’s a random selection of 10 English words:

1. the
2. be
6. to
10. it
15. with
17. not
25. do
33. will
76. over
230. question
236. night
239. away
398. happen
1630. beg

The numbers represent the rankings of these words. There are over 2000 entries in the list and I’ve chosen a variation of different words – some are the most common English words such as ‘the’, ‘to’, and ‘be’; others don’t rank as high but they’re still very common. I’m sure that you know every single one of them!

So, the logical conclusion might be – “Once I know all these words, I have to learn MORE new ones to broaden my English vocabulary!”

Fair enough, but did you know that this is the biggest pitfall so many of us, foreigners, fall for?

You see – the problem is that we may know large lists of individual words, yet we struggle to USE them as part of a simple conversation!

To see what exactly I’m talking about, please look at the following English phrases:

To do away with
It begs the question
It won’t happen overnight
It happens to be
To be over with

All these phrases consist ONLY of the words from the list above, but how many of them you can honestly claim to be able to use?

I hope you start seeing the bigger picture now.

We may be very, very familiar with certain English words, YET we struggle to arrange them in natural speech patterns!

Basically it all boils down to WORD COMBINATIONS.

It’s just like playing lottery – you only have a small number of individual numbers, and you think – “What’s the big deal! Surely I can guess 5 or 6 of them!” In reality the number of combinations is mind-boggling, and the very same goes with individual English words and their combinations!

Biggest Problem I Have With The Frequency Lists – They Promote the Wrong Learning Methods!

The very concept of a frequency list implies that English learning is all about separate words.

Statements like “The first 100 most commonly used English words make up 50% of all written material” makes us believe that we have to learn SEPARATE WORDS, and once we’ve acquired the optimal amount of words – we’ll be able to speak and write just like a native speaker.

Nothing could be further from the truth however, and I think I made it more than obvious using the examples above.

Just because you KNOW certain English words, it doesn’t necessarily mean you can COMBINE them into phrases and sentences!

You must make it your goal to KNOW English word combinations, and just like when playing lottery a handful or words may easily avail you of a much bigger amount of phrases to use!

Those five phrases I gave you a few paragraphs above are way more useful than the list of individual words. You can learn phrases and use them in relevant situations just like native English speakers would, but if you learn separate words, your means of expression are rather limited.

It’s the typical old-school approach – learning grammar rules, word lists and then stick words together and form sentences. It’s ineffective, unnatural and totally wrong!

Here’s what’s going to happen if you stick separate words together:

Your English is going to sound unnatural because you’ll translate from your native language when creating English sentences;
You won’t be able to produce spontaneous English speech because you’ll have to construct new sentences every time you speak!

“What Are the Most Commonly Used English PHRASES?” is the Right Question!

I can’t stress this enough – if you learn English phrases, expressions and sayings, you’ll be able to use them 10 times more efficiently than word lists!

Once you’ve memorized a phrase, you’re capable or using it WITHOUT MUCH THINKING AND PLANNING whereas sticking words together will always involve a certain amount of effort and your speech is going to be hesitant and slow.

English word frequency lists are a good representation of the 80/20 rule in action, and they prove that one doesn’t need to spend a lifetime learning 100 thousand English words to become fluent.

English words lists are good for linguists and grammar geeks.

Other than that, they serve no practical purpose!

So my advice is the following – you should definitely replace the question “what are the most commonly used English words?” with “what are the most commonly used English phrases?”!

Robby

P.S. Would you like to find out why I’m highlighting some of the text in red? Read this article and you’ll learn why it’s so important to learn idiomatic expressions and how it will help you to improve your spoken English!

P.S.S. Are you serious about your spoken English improvement? Check out my English Harmony System HERE!

P.S. Are you serious about your spoken English improvement? Check out the English Harmony System HERE!

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HomeMost common English words10000 Most common English words (Proficiency)

10000 Most common English words (Proficiency)

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I need a sorted list of the most frequent spoken English words for everyday situations. Think of the most important words for a beginner learning the language. When learning new words, you’d want to learn them in the order of their frequency or importance, that is, first the most basic ones.

There are many frequency lists which are compiled from written text, but for spoken text, I have not yet found anything usable. Examples:

Most lists found online are not sorted by word frequency. They just list the top 100 or top 1000 words.
https://1000mostcommonwords.com/1000-most-common-english-words/ seems to be what I’m looking for. However, it has ‘sleep’ on position 559, but ‘syllable’ on position 533 and ‘vowel’ on 479. I’m pretty sure that the majority of people uses the word ‘sleep’ much much more often than ‘syllable’ or ‘vowel’. Then, ‘develop’ is at 437, ‘morning’ at 475. All the people saying several times «Good Morning» each day seem to not be counted in this list. Even stranger results in other languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English lists the top 100 words according to the Oxford English Corpus (OCE). This looks quite good, but I still think there is a bias towards written English. For example, I cannot find the words ‘thank’/’thanks’, ‘morning’, ‘sleep’, ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘last’, and ‘great’ in the top-100 list. But the words ‘people’ and ‘work’ are there. In spoken text, is ‘people’ really more frequently used than ‘great’, ‘yes’ or ‘thanks’?

I do not need anything rigorous. It just should not have an obvious bias towards written English, like the examples above. Furthermore, it does not matter whether filler «words» like ‘uhm’, ‘ah’, ‘huh’ are included in the list or not.

Bonus points if the list is also available in other languages (like 1000mostcommonwords.com), but this is not important.

Источник

100 most common words

Parts of speech

See also

Word lists

References

External links

Words English speakers say all the time

Pronouns

Common verbs in English

Nouns

Question words

Prepositions in English

English Adjectives

Miscellaneous English words

English Word Frequency Lists Only Satisfy Our Curiosity – They’re NO GOOD for Anything ELSE!

Sorry – Word Lists Are Good for SOMETHING – They Teach Us Not to Waste Our Time!

It’s the Word Combinations that Matter – not Separate Words and Word Lists!

Biggest Problem I Have With The Frequency Lists – They Promote the Wrong Learning Methods!

“What Are the Most Commonly Used English PHRASES?” is the Right Question!

10000 Most common English words (Proficiency)