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by word class","The same corpus data, filtered to one part of speech at a time. Bars are relative to the most frequent word within each category.",[483,495,506,521],{"slug":484,"label":485,"count":476,"status":486,"blurb":487,"title":488,"top":489},"top-100-verbs","Verbs","live","The verbs that carry almost every English sentence, from be and have down to serve and break.","The 100 Most Common English Verbs",[490,491,492,493,494],{"rank":59,"word":66,"per_million":69},{"rank":65,"word":111,"per_million":112},{"rank":71,"word":126,"per_million":127},{"rank":77,"word":173,"per_million":174},{"rank":80,"word":193,"per_million":194},{"slug":496,"label":497,"count":476,"status":486,"blurb":498,"title":499,"top":500},"top-100-nouns","Nouns","The things, people and ideas English talks about most: time, people, year, way, thing.","The 100 Most Common English Nouns",[501,502,503,504,505],{"rank":59,"word":287,"per_million":290},{"rank":65,"word":324,"per_million":325},{"rank":71,"word":332,"per_million":333},{"rank":77,"word":406,"per_million":407},{"rank":80,"word":422,"per_million":423},{"slug":507,"label":508,"count":476,"status":486,"blurb":509,"title":510,"top":511},"top-100-adjectives","Adjectives","The describing words that do the heavy lifting: other, good, new, great, big.","The 100 Most Common English Adjectives",[512,513,514,515,518],{"rank":59,"word":372,"per_million":375},{"rank":65,"word":450,"per_million":451},{"rank":71,"word":477,"per_million":478},{"rank":77,"word":516,"per_million":517},"great",701.9,{"rank":80,"word":519,"per_million":520},"big",604.58,{"slug":522,"label":523,"count":476,"status":524,"blurb":525,"title":526,"top":527},"most-common-phrasal-verbs","Phrasal verbs","soon","Verb + particle combinations that native speakers reach for constantly and learners avoid.",null,[],{"heading":529,"paragraphs":530},"Methodology",[531,532,533,534,535],"Rankings are calculated from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), a one-billion-word corpus of American English covering 1990 to 2019 across spoken transcripts, fiction, magazines, newspapers, academic writing, blogs, other web text and TV\u002Ffilm subtitles. The frequency data is published at www.wordfrequency.info, which is the source for every number on this page.","Raw counts are normalised to a rate per million words so that words can be compared fairly across genres of very different sizes. The figure shown next to each word is that rate: 'the' occurs roughly 50,385 times per million words, 'be' roughly 32,623.","Entries are lemmas, not word forms. Inflected forms are grouped under their dictionary headword — runs, ran and running all count towards run — which reflects how speakers organise vocabulary mentally and stops one verb occupying six slots in a top-100 list.","Part-of-speech tagging comes from the corpus itself. Words that work as more than one class are counted separately per class, so a word can appear in more than one category ranking with different figures. Note that modal verbs are tagged as verbs rather than as a separate class, which is why can, will and would appear in the verb ranking.","CEFR levels shown next to each word are our own editorial estimate of when a learner typically meets and uses that word, on the A1–C2 scale. They are a study aid layered on top of the data, not part of the corpus, and we say so rather than implying the corpus assigns them.",[537,540,543,546,549],{"question":538,"answer":539},"What is a corpus, and why does it matter?","A corpus is a very large, structured collection of real texts and transcripts used to measure how a language is actually used. It matters because intuition about which words are common is unreliable — counting them across a billion words of real English is not.",{"question":541,"answer":542},"What is the difference between function words and content words?","Function words (the, of, and, to, a) carry grammatical structure and belong to a small closed set. Content words (time, make, good, quickly) carry meaning and belong to a huge open set. Function words dominate the top of every frequency list because every sentence needs them.",{"question":544,"answer":545},"How many of these words do I need to know?","The first hundred words of a frequency list account for a large share of the words in a typical English text, but they are mostly grammar. Real comprehension comes from combining them with the content words in the category rankings.",{"question":547,"answer":548},"How is my personal score calculated?","It counts the words you have ticked as known across the category rankings, divided by the total number of ranked words in those lists. Your ticks are saved in your browser, and synced to your account if you have one. They are always private — nothing is shared or compared with other users.",{"question":550,"answer":551},"Where does the data come from, and how often is it updated?","From www.wordfrequency.info, which publishes frequency lists derived from COCA. The underlying corpus covers 1990 to 2019. We re-import when the published lists are updated; the date at the top of the page shows the last refresh.",{"heading":553,"paragraphs":554},"How word frequency should change the way you study",[555,556,557,558],"Most learners study vocabulary in themed sets — food, travel, the office — because that is how coursebooks are organised. Frequency data suggests a different priority. Words are not evenly useful, and the difference between the most useful and the merely useful is enormous. A word ranked 100th appears many times more often than one ranked 3,000th, which means an hour spent on the first hundred is worth many hours spent further down.","This has a practical consequence: before learning a themed list, make sure you own the core. If you can read the top of this page and genuinely know every word — not recognise it, but produce it correctly in a sentence — you have a foundation that themed vocabulary can sit on. If you cannot, themed lists will keep collapsing, because the sentences they appear in are held together by words you have not mastered.","Frequency also tells you when to stop. Beyond a few thousand words, the returns flatten sharply and context-based reading becomes a better teacher than any list. Rankings are a tool for the first stretch of the journey, not the whole of it.","Finally, treat these lists as a diagnostic. Tick what you know, look at what is left, and let the gaps choose your next topic. That is a more honest guide to what to study next than any syllabus.",1785755955590]