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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 very large collection of texts from around
the world that are written in the English language. A text corpus is a large
collection of written works that are organised in a way that makes such analysis
easier.

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 Anglo-Saxon 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]



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.[1]



The Oxford English Corpus (OEC) is a text corpus of 21st-century English, used
by the makers of the Oxford English Dictionary and by Oxford University Press's
language research programme. It is the largest corpus of its kind, containing
nearly 2.1 billion words.[1] It includes language from the UK, the United
States, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, Canada, India,
Singapore, and South Africa.[2] The text is mainly collected from web pages;
some printed texts, such as academic journals, have been collected to supplement
particular subject areas.

The sources are writings of all sorts, from "literary novels and specialist
journals to everyday newspapers and magazines and from Hansard to the language
of blogs, emails, and social media".[2] This may be contrasted with similar
databases that sample only a specific kind of writing. The corpus is generally
available only to researchers at Oxford University Press, but other researchers
who can demonstrate a strong need may apply for access.