Their findings were similar, but not identical, to the findings of the OEC analysis.Īccording to The Reading Teacher's Book of Lists, the first 25 words in the OEC make up about one-third of all printed material in English, and the first 100 words make up about half of all written English. The researchers published their analysis of the Brown Corpus in 1967. Īnother English corpus that has been used to study word frequency is the Brown Corpus, which was compiled by researchers at Brown University in the 1960s. The OEC includes a wide variety of writing samples, such as literary works, novels, academic journals, newspapers, magazines, Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, blogs, chat logs, and emails. In total, the texts in the Oxford English Corpus contain more than 2 billion words. Perhaps the most comprehensive such analysis is one that was conducted against the Oxford English Corpus (OEC), a massive text corpus that is written in the English language. Studies that estimate and rank the most common words in English examine texts written in English.

What part of speech is the word very