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Spoken word is an oral poetic performance art that is based mainly on the poem as well as the performer's aesthetic qualities. It is a 20th-century continuation of an ancient oral artistic tradition that focuses on the aesthetics of recitation and word play , such as the performer's live intonation and voice inflection.
Some lists of common words distinguish between word forms, while others rank all forms of a word as a single lexeme (the form of the word as it would appear in a dictionary). For example, the lexeme be (as in to be ) comprises all its conjugations ( is , was , am , are , were , etc.), and contractions of those conjugations. [ 5 ]
The knowledge of the 3000 most frequent English word families or the 5000 most frequent words provides 95% vocabulary coverage of spoken discourse. [21] For minimal reading comprehension a threshold of 3,000 word families (5,000 lexical items) was suggested [ 22 ] [ 23 ] and for reading for pleasure 5,000 word families (8,000 lexical items) are ...
These are 1100 of the most common words in American English in order of usage. This can be a particularly useful list when starting to learn a new language and will help prioritise creating sentences using the words in other languages to ensure that you develop your core quickly.
Another active word-formation process in English is the creation of acronyms, [243] words formed by pronouncing abbreviations of longer phrases as single words, e.g. NATO, laser, scuba. Word origins Main articles: Foreign-language influences in English and Lists of English words by country or language of origin
In spoken English, a singular contraction can be used in reference to a plural in words like there's and where's. This stems from the fact that there're and where're are more difficult to enunciate and are often avoided for that reason in colloquial speech.
The English language was introduced to the Americas by the arrival of the British, beginning in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.The language also spread to numerous other parts of the world as a result of British trade and settlement and the spread of the former British Empire, which, by 1921, included 470–570 million people, about a quarter of the world's population.
Spoken language combines vowel and consonant sounds to form units of meaning like words, which belong to a language's lexicon. There are many different intentional speech acts, such as informing, declaring, asking, persuading, directing; acts may vary in various aspects like enunciation, intonation, loudness, and tempo to convey meaning ...