Have you ever wondered what the most frequently used words in the English language were? Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, and his team answered this query by analyzing the terms found in Google Books data. From their massive library, they discovered that there were 97,565 distinct words that were mentioned a total of 743,842,922,321 times. They then narrowed down the list to the top 50 commonly used words, and YouTube channel Abacaba visualized these findings in an informative short video.
To help us understand the data, Abacaba used colorful bubbles to denote word frequency. The larger the balloon, the more popular the term. Their video reveals that “the” is the most popular English word, followed by “of,” “and,” “to,” and “in.” After presenting that information, Abacaba then groups commonly-reoccurring words together, based on the number of letters they have. This ranges from one to 20-letter terms, beginning with “a” as the most popular single-letter word and finishing with “institutionalization” as the twentieth. To learn more, check out Abacaba's fascinating video below.
Abacaba: Youtube
via [This Isn't Happiness]
