The list below of most common words in English cannot be definitive. It is based on an analysis of the Oxford English Corpus of over a billion words, and represents one study done by Oxford Online, associated with the Oxford English Dictionary.[1] This source includes writings of all sorts from "literary novels and specialist journals to everyday newspapers and magazines and from Hansard to the language of chatrooms, emails, and weblogs",[2] unlike some sources which use texts from only specific sources.[3]
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.[4]
Note that the items listed may represent more than one actual word; they are lemmas. For instance the entry "be" contains within it the occurrences of "are", "is", "were" and "was".[5] Note also that these top 100 lemmas listed below account for 50% of all the words in the Oxford English Corpus.[1]