What's the most common word in current English usage? That's right, it's 'the'. But what's thirtieth, what's six hundredth, and what's eighty thousandth? Now there's a great new website that can tell you the answer ( 'she', 'foreign' and 'autocrats', as it turns out). The site you need to visit is WordCount (via the Guardian weblog), where someone has analysed 100 million words representing "an accurate cross-section of current English usage" and fired the results into an elegant visual linear interface. Nearly 90000 words are listed altogether, and the top 10 reads "the of and to a in that it is was". Full details about the project are here, but I suspect you'll just want to leap in and play. Type(559) in(6) a(5) word(487) to(4) discover(2968) its(62) rank(3899). 559(Type) 6(in) 5(a) 171(number) 4(to) 2968(discover) 1(the) 487(word) 20(at) 7(that) 3899(rank). It's 1754 4906.
Wordcount is a great website for pottering around in and testing things out. So go on, guess which word in each of these pairs is the more common. Guess, then check (either on the site or by rolling your mouse over the blank text at the end of each row).
• boy or girl? girl(616) beats boy (735) • left or right? right(112) beats left(179) • London or England? London(242) beats England(398) • diamond or geezer? diamond(6420) easily beats geezer(26825) • Tesco or Sainsbury? Sainsbury(8216) beats Tesco(11015) • black or white? black(356) just beats white(363)
Why not test your vocabulary by thinking of a word, typing it in and seeing how near the end of the list you can get. Most words you choose tend to be fairly common and the red line barely moves along the scale. I managed to get almost to the end with 'onomatopoeia' (78635) but maybe you can do better (without cheating). Where does your name appear in the list? And your town? And what other quirks can you discover? I was particularly pleased to spot that word 1066 was 'eye' - King Harold would be proud.
The site owner is on the lookout for intriguing sequences of words lifted from the main list, for example "america ensure oil opportunity" (992-995) and "microsoft acquire salary tremendous" (4304-4307). I've managed to form the following poem relating the terrible decline in the British mining industry using consecutive words (2002-2014). Can you do better?
There's one last gem on the site which is a separate listing that ranks all of the words that people have searched for on the WordCount site. The QueryCount list is here, but it's not worksafe (which should give you a pretty good idea about the number 1 word in typed English).
