Viral Stuff: The Top 100 Words We Use

The Oxford English Corpus is such stuff as Oxford Dictionaries are made on. It contains texts collected mainly from innumerable Internet sites. Their total length so far is about two billion words. The texts represent different varieties of English, different genres, styles and registers; they all come from present-day English (from the year 2000 onwards) and are supposed to be representative of the current state of the language. Here are the 100 commonest words in that vast material:

1     the 2     be 3     to 4     of 5     and 6     a 7     in 8     that 9     have 10    I 11    it 12    for 13    not 14    on 15    with 16    he 17    as 18    you 19    do 20    at 21    this 22    but 23    his 24    by 25    from

26    they 27    we 28    say 29    her 30    she 31    or 32    an 33    will 34    my 35    one 36    all 37    would 38    there 39    their 40    what 41    so 42    up 43    out 44    if 45    about 46    who 47    get 48    which 49    go 50    me

51    when 52    make 53    can 54    like 55    time 56    no 57    just 58    him 59    know 60    take 61    people 62    into 63    year 64    your 65    good 66    some 67    could 68    them 69    see 70    other 71    than 72    then 73    now 74    look 75    only

76    come 77    its 78    over 79    think 80    also 81    back 82    after 83    use 84    two 85    how 86    our 87    work 88    first 89    well 90    way 91    even 92    new 93    want 94    because 95    any 96    these 97    give 98    day 99    most 100   us

A few facts are worth noting.

Almost all these words are “native” in the sense that they continue forms inherited from Old English. Most of them can be traced back in time still further, to Proto-Germanic, and quite a large number have their roots in Proto-Indo-European, the most distant reconstructible ancestor of English. Only four of them (just, people, use, and the second syllable of because) are Old French loanwords (first attested in 14th-century documents). A few are of Old Norse origin: notably, the 3pl. personal pronouns they, their, and them, but also want, and possibly take, while get and give owe at least their initial /ɡ/ to Old Norse influence (the closely related Old English verbs began with the palatal glide /j/). The Old Norse loans were taken from the Scandinavian settlers in the Danelaw area, presumably between 800 and 1200. The remaining items (ca. 90% of the list) have “always” been English.

This illustrates the rule that the more common a word is, the less likely it is to undergo lexical replacement [see: Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history]. If we looked instead at the entire lexicon of present-day English, we would find that relatively recent borrowings from foreign languages, most often Latin or French, account for at least some 80% of the vocabulary. That’s because rarely used words are much more likely to be substituted.

Many of the most common items are not content words that indicate things, ideas, actions, states, etc., but function words that mean little or nothing by themseves. They join content words to modify their meaning, express grammatical relationships, glue the sentence together, and facilitate discourse. They include articles, pronouns, conjunction, prepositions, simple adverbs, auxiliary and modal verbs, quantifiers, and miscellaneous “particles”. Nearly all the words in the first two columns above are of this kind (the only exceptions being say, get, and go, whose meaning is not particularly specific either). The “Top 100” words are extremely successful replicators: practically every sentence must contain a few of them. Their occurrences make up about 50% of the total material in the Oxford English Corpus!