"It is difficult to produce a useful report on the frequency of English words, because often there are two different words that have identical appearances (e.g. 'lead' the verb and 'lead' the noun; sometimes 'to' is a preposition and sometimes it's an infinitive verb marker). One of the more useful surveys of a large body of English material is the file ftp://ftp.itri.bton.ac.uk/pub/bnc/all.num.o5.gz which is a survey of the British National Corpus, prepared and made available by the Information Technology Research Institute at the University of Brighton. The material that was surveyed includes millions of words of transcribed conversation, printed text, and lectures and oratory.
"If we look at the 1996 version of this survey and add together items that are closely related -- for example, if we consider ' this ' and ' these ' as a single item -- we find that the following items are the most frequent, starting with ' the ' which makes up 6.18 percent of English usage:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 |
6.18% the 4.23% is, was, be, are, 's (= is), were, been, being, 're, 'm, am 2.94% of 2.68% and 2.46% a, an 1.80% in, inside (preposition) 1.62% to (infinitive verb marker) * 1.37% have, has, have, 've, 's (= has), had, having, 'd (= had) 1.27% he, him, his 1.25% it, its 1.17% I, me, my 0.91% to (preposition) * 0.86% they, them, their 0.86% not, n't, no (interjection) 0.83% for 0.83% you, your 0.70% she, her 0.65% with 0.64% on 0.62% that (conjunction) * 0.58% this, these 0.57% that (demonstrative),* those 0.55% do, did, does, done, doing 0.51% we, us, our 0.50% by 0.47% at 0.45% but (conjunction) 0.44% 's (possessive) 0.41% from 0.40% as (many parts of speech) 0.37% which 0.37% or 0.31% will, 'll 0.28% said, say, says, saying 0.25% would 0.25% what 0.23% there (existential, in "there is ..." phrases) * 0.23% if 0.23% can -- be able to ; may 0.22% all 0.22% who, whose 0.21% so (adverb / conjunction) 0.20% go, went, gone, goes 0.20% more 0.19% other, another 0.19% one (numeral) 0.18% see, saw, seen, seeing 0.18% know, knew, known, knows, knowing -- have knowledge of 0.18% up 0.17% some |
6.18% 10.41 13.35 16.03 18.49 20.29 21.91 23.28 24.55 25.80 26.97 27.88 28.74 29.60 30.43 31.26 31.96 32.61 33.25 33.87 34.45 35.02 35.57 36.08 36.58 37.05 37.50 37.94 38.35 38.75 39.12 39.49 39.80 40.08 40.33 40.58 40.81 41.04 41.27 41.49 41.71 41.92 42.12 42.32 42.51 42.70 42.88 43.06 43.24 43.41 |
The items listed above make up over 43% of the body of English. Note that all but two words are included in Basic English. This gives why Basic is so clear and able to say things in a way common to those who make use of English everyday.
Note : "to", "that" and other words are separated by senses. If combined as one word, they would rank higher.
A useful list of the 1,000 most common words in the English Language can be found HERE.
Finally, Michael P. West provides in his book "A General Service List of English Words" (Longman, London, 1953) a list of 2,284 useful words. The Longman Defining Vocabulary for intermediate students is based on this list, which makes Longman's books useful for advanced Basic English learners.
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