This is some serious food for thought for all English language teachers around the world:
- The top ten most-used words, the, be, to, of, and, a, in, that, have, and I, account for a staggering 25% of the entire corpus of the English language.
- The top twenty-five words in the Oxford English Corpus (OEC) make up about one-third of all printed material in English.
- The one hundred most commonly used words in English comprise about half of all written English.
- 90% of English text is made up of just 1,000 words.
According to a study cited by Robert McCrum in The Story of English, all of the first one hundred of the most common words in English are of Anglo-Saxon origin, except for people, from the Latin populus, and because, in part from the Latin causa.
When it comes to learning English as a foreign language, it goes without saying that memorizing the 1,000 most common words is not going to make you a fluent speaker. It will, on the other hand, be just enough vocabulary to let you hit the ground running when you’re immersed in the language. This also holds true whether you’re learning, French, German, or Chinese!
Sight words make up many of the most commonly used words in the English language. If you regularly teach sight words in class or you’re looking for tips for making sight words more engaging, you might be interested in my post, Sight Words: What, When, & How. To learn more about Old English and the history of the English language, click here to read more!
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