The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [13]
OK, you can open your eyes. Most unsuspecting people who are asked to do this will think the most common words are nation, war, men, and possibly dead. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that function words are far more frequent than any content words. In this particular speech, the most commonly used word was that, which was used twelve times and accounted for 4.5 percent of all the words in the speech. Other frequently used words: the (4.1 percent), we (3.7 percent), here (3.5 percent), to (3.0 percent), a (2.6 percent), and (2.2 percent), can, for, have, it, not, of, this (1.9 percent each). In fact, these fourteen little words account for almost 37 percent of all the words Lincoln used in this beautifully crafted speech. Only one content word is in the top fifteen, nation, which was used only 1.9 percent of the time. It is remarkable that such a great speech can be largely composed of small, insignificant words.
A very small number of stealth words account for most of the words we hear, read, and say. Over the last twenty years, my colleagues and I have amassed a very large collection of text files that includes thousands upon thousands of natural conversations, books, Internet blogs, music lyrics, Wikipedia entries, etc., representing billions of words. Although there are some variations in word use depending on what people are writing or saying, it is striking to see how common function words are in all types of text.
Spend a minute inspecting the word table on the next page. This is a list of the twenty most commonly used words in English based on our large language bank. Across both written and spoken text, for example, the word I accounts for 3.6 percent of all words that are used. If you consider these twenty words together, they represent almost 30 percent of all words that people use, read, and hear.
Notice that all of the words in the table are quite short and are made up exclusively of pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and auxiliary verbs. If we extended the list to all of the common stealth or function words in English, the list would include around 450 words. Indeed, these 450 words account for over half (55 percent) of all the words we use.
THE MOST FREQUENTLY USED WORDS ACROSS BOTH SPOKEN AND WRITTEN TEXTS
RANK
WORD
PERCENTAGE
OF ALL WORDS
1
I
3.64
2
the
3.48
3
and
2.92
4
to
2.91
5
a
1.94
6
of
1.83
7
that
1.48
8
in
1.29
9
it
1.19
10
my
1.08
11
is
1.06
12
you
1.05
13
was
1.01
14
for
0.80
15
have
0.70
16
with
0.67
17
he
0.66
18
me
0.64
19
on
0.63
20
but
0.62
To put this in perspective, the average English speaker has an impressive vocabulary of perhaps one hundred thousand words. This means that only a trivial percentage of the words we know are associated with linguistic style—about 0.04 percent of all words. The other 99.96 percent of our vocabulary is made up of content words. This split is comparable in other languages—German, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Korean, and others we have studied. In all languages, a small number of function words are used at dizzying rates compared to a large number of content words that are used at very low rates.
Briefly consider the implications of these numbers. If you want to learn a new language such as German or Finnish, you can pick up almost half the language in an afternoon. Most anyone can master the top one hundred stealth words with minimal training. By early evening, you could sit down with any German newspaper or Finnish philosophy text and identify half of the words that were used. The only downside is that you would have absolutely no idea what you were reading.
FUNCTION WORDS: THEY’RE SHORT AND ALMOST INVISIBLE
Look back at the top twenty function words. You will notice that seventeen of the twenty words are three letters or fewer in length. The most common words in every language tend to be short and are usually a single, easy-to-pronounce syllable.
Not only are stealth