[B a s i m a]

The commonest English words



The only way to measure this is to analyse a large collection (or 'corpus') of texts, but lists based on different collections (or 'corpora') tend to disagree about even the top ten words in English.

A rough top thirty, based on the Oxford English Corpus, might look something like this


:::


the
is
of
and
a
in
that
have
I
it
for
be
not
with
he
as
do
at
this
his
by
from
her
say


...