The list below of most common words in English cannot be definitive. It is based on an analysis of the Oxford English Corpus

Oxford English Corpus

The Oxford English Corpus is a text corpus of English language 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 over two billion words...

 of over a billion

1000000000 (number)

1,000,000,000 is the natural number following 999,999,999 and preceding 1,000,000,001.In scientific notation, it is written as 109....

 words, and represents one study done by Oxford Online, associated with the Oxford English Dictionary

Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...

. This source includes writings of all sorts from "literary novels and specialist journals to everyday newspapers and magazines and from Hansard

Hansard

Hansard is the name of the printed transcripts of parliamentary debates in the Westminster system of government. It is named after Thomas Curson Hansard, an early printer and publisher of these transcripts.-Origins:...

 to the language of chatrooms, emails, and weblogs", unlike some sources which use texts from only specific sources.

The Reading Teachers Book of Lists claims that the first 25 words make up about one-third of all printed material in English, and that the first 100 make up about one-half of all written material.

Note that the items listed may represent more than one actual word; they are lemma

Lemma (linguistics)

In morphology and lexicography, a lemma is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of words...

s. For instance the entry "be" contains within it the occurrences of "are", "is", "were" and "was". Note also that these top 100 lemmas listed below account for 50% of all the words in the Oxford English Corpus.



Source:

Nouns

1. time
2. person
3. year
4. way
5. day
6. thing
7. man
8. world
9. life
10. hand
11. part
12. child
13. eye
14. woman
15. place
16. work
17. week
18. case
19. point
20. government
21. company
22. number
23. group
24. problem
25. fact

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Verbs

1. be
2. have
3. do
4. say
5. get
6. make
7. go
8. know
9. take
10. see
11. come
12. think
13. look
14. want
15. give
16. use
17. find
18. tell
19. ask
20. work
21. seem
22. feel
23. try
24. leave
25. call

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Adjectives

1. good
2. new
3. first
4. last
5. long
6. great
7. little
8. own
9. other
10. old
11. right
12. big
13. high
14. different
15. small
16. large
17. next
18. early
19. young
20. important
21. few
22. public
23. bad
24. same
25. able

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Prepositions

1. to
2. of
3. in
4. for
5. on
6. with
7. at
8. by
9. from
10. up
11. about
12. into
13. over
14. after

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Source:

See also

• Oxford Corpus' 100 Compared to Dolch and Fry
• A General Service List of English Words
  A General Service List of English Words
  The General Service List is a list of roughly 2000 words published by Michael West in 1953. The words were selected to represent the most frequent words of English and were taken from a corpus of written English. The target audience was English language learners and ESL teachers...
  
  
• Basic English
  Basic English
  Basic English, also known as Simple English, is an English-based controlled language created by linguist and philosopher Charles Kay Ogden as an international auxiliary language, and as an aid for teaching English as a Second Language...
  
  
• Dolch Word List
  Dolch word list
  The Dolch Word List is a list of frequently used words compiled by Edward William Dolch, PhD. The list was prepared in 1936. The list was originally published in his book Problems in Reading in 1948. Under the copyright laws in effect during the time of publication, the Dolch word list is out of...
  
  
• Frequency analysis
  Frequency analysis
  In cryptanalysis, frequency analysis is the study of the frequency of letters or groups of letters in a ciphertext. The method is used as an aid to breaking classical ciphers....
  
  
• Frequency list
  Frequency list
  In computational linguistics, a frequency list is a sorted list of words together with their frequency, where frequency here usually means the number of occurrences in a given corpus...
  
  
• Letter frequencies
  Letter frequencies
  The frequency of letters in text has often been studied for use in cryptography, and frequency analysis in particular. No exact letter frequency distribution underlies a given language, since all writers write slightly differently. Linotype machines sorted the letters' frequencies as etaoin shrdlu...
  
  
• Most common words in Esperanto
  Most common words in Esperanto
  - See also :*Frequency analysis *Frequency list*Most common words in English*Swadesh list*Zipf's law- External links :* "contains the 552 most frequent Esperanto words and morphemes"...
  
  
• Number of words in English
• Oxford English Corpus
  Oxford English Corpus
  The Oxford English Corpus is a text corpus of English language 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 over two billion words...
  
  
• Swadesh list
  Swadesh list
  A Swadesh list is one of several lists of vocabulary with basic meanings, developed by Morris Swadesh from 1940 onward, with the final, posthumously published version 1971 [1972], which is used in lexicostatistics and glottochronology .- Versions and authors :There are several versions of Swadesh...
  
  
• Zipf's law