Most common words in English - wikipedia Most common words in English 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. 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. 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. 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. 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, are, were, etc. ), and contractions of those conjugations. Note also that these top 100 lemmas listed below account for 50 % of all the words in the Oxford English Corpus. Contents 1 100 most common words 1.1 Parts of speech 1.1. 1 Nouns 1.1. 2 Verbs 1.1. 3 Adjectives 1.1. 4 Prepositions 1.1. 5 Others 2 See also 2.1 Word lists 3 References 4 External links 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 running words ). 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 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 COCA list includes dispersion as well as frequency to calculate rank. Word Parts of speech OEC rank COCA rank Dolch level the Article Pre-primer be Verb primer to Preposition 7, 9 Pre-primer of Preposition Grade 1 and Conjunction 5 Pre-primer Article 6 5 Pre-primer in Preposition 7 6, 128, 3038 Pre-primer that Conjunction et al. 8 12, 27, 903 primer have Verb 9 8 primer Pronoun 10 11 Pre-primer it Pronoun 11 10 Pre-primer for Preposition 12 13, 2339 Pre-primer not Adverb et al. 13 28, 2929 Pre-primer on Preposition 14 17, 155 primer with Preposition 15 16 primer he Pronoun 16 15 primer as Adverb, conjunction, et al. 17 33, 49, 129 Grade 1 you Pronoun 18 14 Pre-primer do Verb, noun 19 18 primer at Preposition 20 22 primer this Determiner, adverb, noun 21 20, 4665 primer but Preposition, adverb, conjunction 22 23, 1715 primer his Possessive pronoun 23 25, 1887 Grade 1 by Preposition 24 30, 1190 Grade 1 from Preposition 25 26 Grade 1 they Pronoun 26 21 primer we Pronoun 27 24 Pre-primer say Verb et al. 28 19 primer her Possessive pronoun 29, 106 42 Grade 1 she Pronoun 30 31 primer or Conjunction 31 32 Grade 2 an Article 32 ( a ) Grade 1 will Verb, noun 33 48, 1506 primer my Possessive pronoun 34 44 Pre-primer one Noun, adjective, et al. 35 51, 104, 839 Pre-primer all Adjective 36 43, 222 primer would Verb 37 41 Grade 2 there Adverb, pronoun, et al. 38 53, 116 primer their Possessive pronoun 39 36 Grade 2 what Pronoun, adverb, et al. 40 34 primer so Conjunction, adverb, et al. 41 55, 196 primer up Adverb, preposition, et al. 42 50, 456 Pre-primer out Preposition 43 64, 149 primer if Conjunction 44 40 Grade 3 about Preposition, adverb, et al. 45 46, 179 Grade 3 who Pronoun, noun 46 38 primer get Verb 47 39 primer which 48 58 Grade 2 go Verb, noun 49 35 Pre-primer me Pronoun 50 61 Pre-primer when 51 57, 136 Grade 1 make Verb, noun 52 45 can 53 37, 2973 like 54 74, 208, 1123, 1684, 2702 time 55 52 no 56 93, 699, 916, 1111, 4555 just Adjective 57 66, 1823 him Pronoun 58 68 know Verb, noun 59 47 take Verb, noun 60 63 people Noun 61 62 into 62 65 year Noun 63 54 your Possessive pronoun 64 69 good Adjective 65 110, 2280 some 66 60 could Verb 67 71 them 68 59 see Verb 69 67 other 70 75, 715, 2355 than 71 73, 712 then 72 77 now 73 72, 1906 look Verb 74 85, 604 only 75 101, 329 come Verb 76 70 its Possessive pronoun 77 78 over Preposition 78 124, 182 think 79 56 also 80 87 back 81 108, 323, 1877 after Preposition 82 120, 260 use Verb, noun 83 92, 429 two 84 80 how 85 76 our Possessive pronoun 86 79 work Verb, noun 87 117, 199 first 88 86, 2064 well Adverb 89 100, 644 way 90 84, 4090 even 91 107, 484 new Adjective et al. 92 88 want 93 83 because 94 89, 509 any 95 109, 4720 these 96 82 give Verb 97 98 day 98 90 most 99 144, 187 us Pronoun 100 113 Parts of speech The following is the same list subdivided by part of speech. The list labeled `` Others '' includes pronouns, possessives, articles, modal verbs, adverbs, and conjunctions. Nouns time person year way day thing man world life hand part child eye woman place work week case point government company number group problem fact Verbs be have do say get make go know take see come think look want give use find tell ask work seem feel try leave call Adjectives good new first last long great little own other old right big high different small large next early young important few public bad same able Prepositions to of in for on with at by from up about into over after Others the and that it not he as you this but his they her she or an will my one all would there their See also Languages portal Basic English Frequency analysis, the study of the frequency of letters or groups of letters Letter frequencies Oxford English Corpus Swadesh list, a compilation of basic concepts for the purpose of historical - comparative linguistics Zipf 's law, a theory stating that the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in a frequency table Word lists Dolch Word List, a list of frequently used English words General Service List Word lists by frequency References ^ Jump up to : `` 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. Jump up ^ `` The Oxford English Corpus ''. AskOxford.com. Retrieved June 22, 2006. Jump up ^ The First 100 Most Commonly Used English Words. Jump up ^ Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue : English and How It Got That Way, Harper Perennial, 2001, page 58 Jump up ^ Benjamin Zimmer. June 22, 2006. Time after time after time... Language Log. Retrieved June 22, 2006. Jump up ^ `` Word frequency : based on 450 million word COCA corpus ''. www.wordfrequency.info. Retrieved 11 April 2018. External links Look up frequency lists in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. 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Question: which is the most common word in english
Answer: the