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A list of 100 words that occur most frequently in written English is given below, based on an analysis of the Oxford English Corpus (a collection of texts in the English language, comprising over 2 billion words). [1]
English has many polysemous words. For example, the verb "to get" can mean "procure" (I'll get the drinks), "become" (she got scared), "understand" (I get it) etc. In linear or vertical polysemy, one sense of a word is a subset of the other. These are examples of hyponymy and hypernymy, and are sometimes called autohyponyms. [7]
Strengths is the longest word in the English language containing only one vowel letter. [30] Euouae, a medieval musical term, is the longest English word consisting only of vowels, and the word with the most consecutive vowels.
[not verified in body] [4] [page range too broad] English borrowed many words from Old Norse, the North Germanic language of the Vikings, [5] and later from Norman French, the Romance language of the Normans, which descends from Latin. Estimates of native words derived from Old English range up to 33%, [6] with the rest made up of outside ...
The dictionary contains 157,000 combinations and derivatives, and 169,000 phrases and combinations, making a total of over 600,000 word-forms. [41] [42] There is one count that puts the English vocabulary at about 1 million words—but that count presumably includes words such as Latin species names, prefixed and suffixed words, scientific ...
These include Basic English (850 words), Special English (1,500 words), General Service List (2,000 words), and Academic Word List. Some learner's dictionaries have developed defining vocabularies which contain only most common and basic words. As a result, word definitions in such dictionaries can be understood even by learners with a limited ...
While proper names may be realized by multi-word constituents, a proper noun is word-level unit in English. Thus, Zealand, for example, is a proper noun, but New Zealand, though a proper name, is not a proper noun. [4] Unlike some common nouns, proper nouns do not typically show number contrast in English.
Compounds are units of meaning formed with two or more words. The words are usually written separately, but some may be hyphenated or be written as one word. Often the meaning of the compound can be guessed by knowing the meaning of the individual words. It is not always simple to detach collocations and compounds. car park; post office; narrow ...