There’s no exact count of how many words are in the English language, but there are some rough estimates. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), for example, there are about 171,000 words in use in English, with another 47,000 obsolete words listed in the OED. But the average person’s vocabulary doesn’t come anywhere close to that. Native language speakers know an average of 20,000 words, while someone who is learning English as a secondary language might know only 3,000 to 5,000 words.
Of that smaller subset, certain words are used more commonly, and others might almost never be used in casual conversation. In order to analyze how people actually use English, lexicographers have gathered a collection of almost 2.1 billion contemporary English phrases, slang terms, and words into the Oxford English Corpus (OEC), from sources spreading across blogs and social media to academic journals and literary novels.
According to the OEC, here are the top 10 most commonly used words in the English language.
1. “the”
This definite article describes things that have already been mentioned or points out a specific version of a noun (“the car,” “the dog,” or “the shirt”). As the most frequently used word in English, “the” makes up around 7% of all printed words in English-language texts. It comes from the Old English se, which means “this, that.” Early versions of the word may have had masculine and feminine versions, as Spanish, French, and Italian still do.
2. “be”
When Shakespeare penned Hamlet’s famous question — “To be or not to be?” — did he know “be” would remain one of the most popular English words ever? To “be” means simply to exist. This irregular verb takes different forms: “He is here,” “We are going,” “I am walking,” “They were talking,” “She was eating,” “I’ll be leaving,” “He’s being followed,” “I’ve been there.” The word “be” traces back to the Old English beon, which means “exist, come to be, become, happen.”
3. “to”
This simple preposition is used to express direction, as in “We walked to the store,” or “They went to France.” Also from Old English, this word originally meant “in the direction of, for the purpose of, furthermore.” In Middle English, “to” was often used as a prefix, giving English the words “together,” “today,” “tonight,” and “tomorrow.”
4. “of”
“Of,” another preposition, expresses a relationship between two things (“south of Chicago,” “mayor of Gotham,” “piece of cake”). The Old English version of this word was aef, which meant “away from.” The word's meaning shifted closer to a comparison during the Middle English period, and by 1837, “of” was filling in for “have” in many phrases, such as “could of” and “should of,” though these sayings are not grammatically correct.
5. “and”
“And” is used to connect words or introduce an additional comment (“mom and me,” “read and write,” “better and better”). In Old English, this word (sometimes spelled ond) originally meant “thereupon, next.”
6. “a”
As an indefinite article, this tiny word is the counterpart to “the.” It’s used to refer to something for the first time in conversation, or when referring to a nonspecific version of a noun (“a telephone,” “a lawyer,” “a dollar”). “A” is the older form, while “an” was added later as a shortened version of “one.” Eventually, “a” came to be used only in front of consonant sounds, with “an” used before vowel sounds.
7. “in”
This little word is all about the big ideas of space and time. If something is “in,” it appears to be enclosed or surrounded by something else, or it takes place in a certain period (“in the mirror,” “in a film,” “in the future”). In Old English, this word performed even more functions, serving as “in, into, upon, on, at, among, about, during.”
8. “that”
“That” refers to a person or thing observed by the speaker (“that coat,” “that man,” “that brush”). It’s from the Old English word paet, meaning “that, so that, after that.” Like “the,” this word also was used with specific masculine and feminine versions at one time, but such usage fell out of fashion in the Middle English period.
9. “have”
If you “have” something, you possess, own, or hold it. This word comes from the Old English habban, meaning “to win, possess, be subject to, experience.”
10. “I”
The shortest pronoun is also one of the most powerful; a speaker uses it to refer to themselves. Dating back to 12th-century Old English, this is a shortened form of the word ic. The term appeared capitalized by the mid-13th century to stand out as a distinct word in handwritten manuscripts.
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