Saturday, July 01, 2006

From Time To Hand: The 10 Most Common Nouns In English

  1. time
  2. person
  3. year
  4. way
  5. day
  6. thing
  7. world
  8. man
  9. life
  10. hand
According to the Oxford English Corpus, and who am I to argue? The corpus site actually lists the 25 most common nouns, verbs, and adjectives, as well as the 100 most common words, and many many more fun lists and statistics about usage patterns in the English language, such as the most common coinages using suffixes like - fest and -ville...

It's a geek thing.
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Posted by ToxicPurity at 7/01/2006 09:38:00 pm

4 comments:

teddlesruss said...

And den... They skew the percentages of the last five percentile lemmas with a phrase like:

This would include some words which may occur only once or twice in the whole corpus: highly technical terms like chrondrogenesis or dicarboxylate, and one-off coinages like bootlickingly or unsurfworthy.

Those words have now been signficantly altered in ranking....

Or not. You're right, it's a geek thing...

2/7/06 12:06
ToxicPurity said...

I don't know about "significantly", since those one-offs are hardly going to exist in splendid isolation. But yeah, it's a very geek thing. I wanna play!

2/7/06 20:59
teddlesruss said...

Well, "unsurfworthy" has now gone from being a "one-off coinage" to having been used at least on four different occasions... It's almost in the next bracket, not a rare word at all!

unsurfworthy unsurfworthy unsurfworthy unsurfworthy unsurfworthy unsurfworthy

And now it's moved another percentile. heheheh I have just single-handedly created a lemma dilemma. And changed the composition of the English language, in a probably significantly nonunsurfworthy manner. And added another lemma...

3/7/06 00:12
ToxicPurity said...

Glad you found a new hobby, Ted, bootlickingly unsurfworthy as it might seem :)

4/7/06 10:16

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