As I said in my last post, finding out the 100 most common (and/or most important) words in English is not a simple task. If you want to know which words a new student of English is likely to hear the most, you might want to look to Hollywood for the answer.
For one thing, most movies try to approximate real, natural, conversation. Since a large number of scripts (or better yet, transcripts) are available online, this is a relatively easy way to build a corpus of conversational data for American English. And anyway, a large portion of those studying English are doing so at least in part because they want to be able to understand American movies!
I built a relatively small corpus from transcripts of the following movies: American Splendor, Election, Enemy of the State, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Fargo, Garden State, Igby Goes Down, and Jumanji. I tried to find a variety of recent movies with believable dialogue and no weird dialects. My selection was limited; several files I downloaded had technical problems, so I had to throw them out.
Anyway, I broke the scripts down and sorted the individual words by the number of times they occurred in all the movies combined. Unlike the frequency lists I mentioned in my last post, I merged different forms of the same word to try and get a feel for the importance of the root word. That's not the only way to do it, but it's the way I did it, so live with it!
I think it's a pretty good representation of the 100 most common words in everyday speech. It's actually 101 because I thought you might need to edit out a certain curse word that occurred with surprising frequency overall.
Those words listed inside of curly braces were counted toward more than one entry, usually because they're a combination of two or more words (or morphemes anyway). To be consistent, I really would've liked to break down words like "talking" into "talk" and "-ing", but I just didn't have the time to be so picky. You can try it if you want, but you'll need to find a good text editor that can sort alphabetically, use regular expressions, and so on.
- be / am / 'm / is / 's / are / 're / being / beings / was / were / been
- me / I / {my / mine / myself}
- you / ya / {your / yours / yourself / yourselves}
- the
- to
- a[n]
- '[s] / {my / mine / our / ours / your / yours / its / his / her / hers / their / theirs / whose}
- it / {its}
- do / does / doing / did / done
- not / -n't
- have / has / having / had / {'d}
- that / those
- and
- us / we / {our / ours / ourselves}
- what / {somewhat / whatever / whatsoever}
- of
- this / these
- him / he / {his / himself}
- get / gets / getting / got / gotten / {gotta} / getter
- in
- go / goes / going / {gonna} / went / gone
- know / knows / knowing / knew / known
- on
- no / no-
- yes / yeah / yep / yup
- for
- thing / things / {anything / everything / nothing / something}
- them / they / {their / themselves}
- just
- like / likes / liked / likely
- her / she / {herself}
- so
- can / {cannot}
- one / ones / {anyone / everyone / someone} / only / once
- some / some-
- oh
- here
- all
- come / comes / coming / came
- there
- think / thinks / thinking / thought / thoughts
- will / 'll
- with
- but
- OK
- right / rights / righto
- want / wants / wanting / wanted
- up
- about
- at
- good / better / best / goodness
- out / {outta}
- uh / um
- how / {anyhow / somehow / however}
- real / really / reality / realize / realized
- any / any-
- hi / hello / hey / hiya
- see / sees / seeing / saw / seen
- fuck / fucking / fucked / fucker / {motherfucking / motherfucker / motherfuckers / fuckwit}
- if
- now
- say / says / saying / said
- look / looks / looking / looked
- would / {'d}
- well
- time / times / {anytime / sometime / sometimes}
- make / makes / making / made
- who / whom / {whose}
- where / {anywhere / everywhere / nowhere / somewhere / wherever}
- man / men / mannish
- or
- tell / tells / telling / told
- take / takes / taking / took / taken
- back
- mean / means / meaning / meant
- could
- let / lets / letting
- work / works / working / workings / worked / worker / workers
- every / every-
- Mr. / mister / Mrs. / Miss
- thank / thanks
- person / people / persons / personal / personally / personality / personalized
- call / calls / calling / called
- need / needs / needing / needed
- from
- guy / guys
- as
- when / {whenever}
- god / gosh / god-
- why
- sorry
- way / ways / {anyway / anyways}
- day / days / {everyday / someday}
- down
- talk / talks / talking / talked
- then
- more / {anymore}
- little
- should
- life / {lives}
- may / {maybe}