The thousand most common words in written English

By Jack Brummet
English Language Stringer

There are hundreds of lists of the most common words on various--mostly English teaching--web sites. This first 100 words make up about one-half of all written material, or, in short, half of all known documents contain just these words. The top 300 words make up 65% of all written materials.  These are listed in rank order from the most common, on down.

Source: The Reading Teacher’s Book of Lists, Fourth Edition, © 2000 by Prentice Hall,  by Fry, Kress & Fountoukidis

Words 1-25

the
of
and
a
to
in
is
you
that
it
he
was
for
on
are
as
with
his
they
I
at
be
this
have
from

Words 26-50

or
one
had
by
word
but
not
what
all
were
we
when
your
can
said
there
use
an
each
which
she
do
how
their
if

Words 51-75

will
up
other
about
out
many
then
them
these
so
some
her
would
make
like
him
into
time
has
look
two
more
write
go
see

Words 75-100

number
no
way
could
people
my
than
first
water
been
call
who
oil
its
now
find
long
down
day
did
get
come
made
may
part
Words 101-125

over
new
sound
take
only
little
work
know
place
year
live
me
back
give
most
very
after
thing
our
just
name
good
sentence
man
think

Words 126-150

say
great
where
help
through
much
before
line
right
too
mean
old
any
same
tell
boy
follow
came
want
show
also
around
form
three
small

Words 151-175

set
put
end
does
another
well
large
must
big
even
such
because
turn
here
why
ask
went
men
read
need
land
different
home
us
move

Words 176-200

try
kind
hand
picture
again
change
off
play
spell
air
away
animal
house
point
page
letter
mother
answer
found
study
still
learn
should
America
world

Words 201-225

high
every
near
add
food
between
own
below
country
plant
last
school
father
keep
tree
never
start
city
earth
eye
light
thought
head
under
story

Words 226-250

saw
left
don’t
few
while
along
might
close
something
seem
next
hard
open
example
begin
life
always
those
both
paper
together
got
group
often
run

Words 251-275

important
until
children
side
feet
car
mile
night
walk
white
sea
began
grow
took
river
four
carry
state
once
book
hear
stop
without
second
later

Words 276-300

miss
idea
enough
eat
face
watch
far
Indian
really
almost
let
above
girl
sometimes
mountain
cut
young
talk
soon
list
song
being
leave
family
it’s

Words 301-325

body
music
color
stand
sun
question
fish
area
mark
dog
horse
birds
problem
complete
room
knew
since
ever
piece
told
usually
didn’t
friends
easy
heard

Words 326-350

order
red
door
sure
become
top
ship
across
today
during
short
better
best
however
low
hours
black
products
happened
whole
measure
remember
early
waves
reached
Words 351-375

listen
wind
rock
space
covered
fast
several
hold
himself
toward
five
step
morning
passed
vowel
true
hundred
against
pattern
numeral
table
north
slowly
money
map

Words 376-400

farm
pulled
draw
voice
seen
cold
cried
plan
notice
south
sing
war
ground
fall
king
town
I’ll
unit
figure
certain
field
travel
wood
fire
upon

Words 401-425

done
English
road
halt
ten
fly
gave
box
finally
wait
correct
oh
quickly
person
became
shown
minutes
strong
verb
stars
front
feel
fact
inches
street

Words 426-450

decided
contain
course
surface
produce
building
ocean
class
note
nothing
rest
carefully
scientists
inside
wheels
stay
green
known
island
week
less
machine
base
ago
stood

Words 451-475

plane
system
behind
ran
round
boat
game
force
brought
understand
warm
common
bring
explain
dry
though
language
shape
deep
thousands
yes
clear
equation
yet
government

Words 476-500

filled
heat
full
hot
check
object
am
rule
among
noun
power
cannot
able
six
size
dark
ball
material
special
heavy
fine
pair
circle
include
built

Words 501-525

can’t
matter
square
syllables
perhaps
bill
felt
suddenly
test
direction
center
farmers
ready
anything
divided
general
energy
subject
Europe
moon
region
return
believe
dance
members

Words 526-550

picked
simple
cells
paint
mind
love
cause
rain
exercise
eggs
train
blue
wish
drop
developed
window
difference
distance
heart
sit
sum
summer
wall
forest
probably

Words 551-575

legs
sat
main
winter
wide
written
length
reason
kept
interest
arms
brother
race
present
beautiful
store
job
edge
past
sign
record
finished
discovered
wild
happy

Words 576-600

beside
gone
sky
glass
million
west
lay
weather
root
instruments
meet
third
months
paragraph
raised
represent
soft
whether
clothes
flowers
shall
teacher
held
describe
drive

Words 601-625

cross
speak
solve
appear
metal
son
either
ice
sleep
village
factors
result
jumped
snow
ride
care
floor
hill
pushed
baby
buy
century
outside
everything
tall

Words 626-650

already
instead
phrase
soil
bed
copy
free
hope
spring
case
laughed
nation
quite
type
themselves
temperature
bright
lead
everyone
method
section
lake
consonant
within
dictionary

Words 651-675

hair
age
amount
scale
pounds
although
per
broken
moment
tiny
possible
gold
milk
quiet
natural
lot
stone
act
build
middle
speed
count
cat
someone
sail

Words 676-700

rolled
bear
wonder
smiled
angle
fraction
Africa
killed
melody
bottom
trip
hole
poor
let’s
fight
surprise
French
died
beat
exactly
remain
dress
iron
couldn’t
fingers

Words 701-725

row
least
catch
climbed
wrote
shouted
continued
itself
else
plains
gas
England
burning
design
joined
foot
law
ears
grass
you’re
grew
skin
valley
cents
key

Words 726-750

president
brown
trouble
cool
cloud
lost
sent
symbols
wear
bad
save
experiment
engine
alone
drawing
east
pay
single
touch
information
express
mouth
yard
equal
decimal

Words 751-775

yourself
control
practice
report
straight
rise
statement
stick
party
seeds
suppose
woman
coast
bank
period
wire
choose
clean
visit
bit
whose
received
garden
please
strange

Words  776-800

caught
fell
team
God
captain
direct
ring
serve
child
desert
increase
history
cost
maybe
business
separate
break
uncle
hunting
flow
lady
students
human
art
feeling

Words 801-825

supply
corner
electric
insects
crops

hit
sand
doctor
provide
thus
won’t
cook
bones
tail
board
modern
compound
mine
wasn’t
fit
addition
belong
safe
soldiers

Words 826-850

guess
silent
trade
rather
compare
crowd
poem
enjoy
elements
indicate
except
expect
flat
seven
interesting
sense
string
blow
famous
value
wings
movement
pole
exciting
branches

Words 851-875

thick
blood
lie
spot
bell
fun
loud
consider
suggested
thin
position
entered
fruit
tied
rich
dollars
send
sight
chief
Japanese
stream
planets
rhythm
eight
science

Words 876-900

major
observe
tube
necessary
weight
meat
lifted
process
army
hat
property
particular
swim
terms
current
park
sell
shoulder
industry
wash
block
spread
cattle
wife
sharp

Words 901-925
company
radio
we’ll
action
capital
factories
settled
yellow
isn’t
southern
truck
fair
printed
wouldn’t
ahead
chance
born
level
triangle
molecules
France
repeated
column
western
church

Words 926-950

sister
oxygen
plural
various
agreed
opposite
wrong
chart
prepared
pretty
solution
fresh
shop
suffix
especially
shoes
actually
nose
afraid
dead
sugar
adjective
fig
office
huge

Words 951-975

gun
similar
death
score
forward
stretched
experience
rose
allow
fear
workers
Washington
Greek
women
bought
led
march
northern
create
British
difficult
match
win
doesn’t
steel

Words 976-1000

total
deal
determine
evening
nor
rope
cotton
apple
details
entire
corn
substances
smell
tools
conditions
cows
track
arrived
located
sir
seat
division
effect
underline
view
---o0o---

Thank you Clarence "Big Man" Clemons for all the music

Clarence Clemons died this weekend, after he suffered a massive stroke last week.  He was a sweet man, and one of the heart and souls of the E Street Band.  I fell in love with his work in the summer of 1977, around the time I visited Asbury Park for the first time.  RIP.


---o0o---

happy 69th birthday to Brian Wilson (with his rare version of God Only Knows and Your Imagination)

Happy 69th birthday Brian Wilson (no, not the closer!).

Brian's solo song Your Imagination--he does all 60 vocal parts.  It's all him!


Outtake-- Brian sings lead (Carl sang lead on the released version)

---o0o---

Poem: Who Am I Today?



By Jack Brummet

I'm no longer the Jack
I was in 2004. Each cell

Is replaced every seven years—
My brain rewires itself

And the new circuits
Sing in a synaptic chorus line.

I don't know if I will wake up
As The Fuhrer,

Bishop Tutu,
Or something in between.
---o0o---

The look: Anthony Weiner and five of his sexual misconduct confederates make the contrite/busted/sad face

click to enlarge - thanks to Jeff Clinton for finding this

---o0o---

Hyman Roth's speech on Moe Greene, from The Godfather, Part 2

Hyman Roth, played by Lee Strasberg, gave this speech in The Godfather 2 to Michael Corleone (who he knew had given the order to have Moe Greene killed):

Hyman Roth: "There was this kid I grew up with; he was younger than me. Sorta looked up to me, you know. We did our first work together, worked our way out of the street. Things were good, we made the most of it. During Prohibition, we ran molasses into Canada... made a fortune, your father, too.

"As much as anyone, I loved him and trusted him. Later on he had an idea to build a city out of a desert stop-over for GI's on the way to the West Coast. That kid's name was Moe Greene, and the city he invented was Las Vegas. This was a great man, a man of vision and guts. And there isn't even a plaque, or a signpost or a statue of him in that town!

"Someone put a bullet through his eye. No one knows who gave the order. When I heard it, I wasn't angry; I knew Moe, I knew he was head-strong, talking loud, saying stupid things. So when he turned up dead, I let it go. And I said to myself, this is the business we've chosen; I didn't ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business!"

Meyer Lansky, the character upon whom Hyman Roth was modeled:

---o0o---

Five Poems

Five Poems
By Jack Brummet


Concrete Poem

No Exit, 3

Once you grab a tiger by the tail,

You can never let it go.

                  ***

Mission Statement

The army
Has two duties--

To break things, and kill people;

Everything else is just fluff and overhead.

                   ***

It's Better Than You Think

1

Every throbbing second of your time here,
You engage in a game of dodge ball,

Bobbing and weaving through a multitude
Of objective hazards, walls, and shoals

Over which you have no control―
And only a fraction of which you ever see.

2

We almost always feel less
Safe than we actually are.

                   ***

Takeback

1
You can withdraw it
Marginalize it
Forget it

Hide it
Lie about it
And deny it three times before the cock crows.

2
You can snigger about it
Weep about it
Shout about it

Hide it under a bush (oh no)
Sing the blues about it
And sweep it under the rug.

3
You can get an ulcer over it
Jump off the Aurora Bridge over it
Lose your family over it

Lose your shorts or mind over it
And pretend
It never happened.

4
You can dream about it
Run away from it
Rationalize it

Psychoanalyze it
And drink it away
But you can't take back love.
    ---o0o---

Ten covers of Waterloo Sunset - one of The Kinks' greatest songs, #42 in Rolling Stone's list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time with videos/covers by Peter Gabriel, Ray Davies, Elliott Smith, Def Leppard, Jackson Brown, and lyrics

By Jack Brummet
Pop Music Editor

Waterloo Bridge on the Thames River in London - click to enlarge

A London FM radio poll in 2004 named Waterloo Sunset the "Greatest Song About London", and Time Out named it the "Anthem of London." 

Waterloo Sunset is  #42 on Rolling Stone's list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.  Paul Weller and Damon Albarn, and many other musicians, cite the song as their favourite of all-time. Even the sometimes cranky Pitchfork Media named it the 29th best song of the 1960s.  It's probably in my top fifty.

The notoriously cranky, but often brilliant,  journalist Robert Christgau called the song "the most beautiful song in the English language."   Pete Townshend of The Who has called it "divine" and "a masterpiece".  Allmusic senior editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine said it is "possibly the most beautiful song of the rock and roll era."

Ray Davies performs the song at Glastonbury in 2010.  This is a wonderful cover of his own song with a choir. 



The Kinks perform Waterloo Sunset at the time of its release:



Billy Bragg's cover, performed right next to Waterloo Bridge in London:



Peter Gabriel's gorgeous and heartbreaking version with strings:



The late, great Elliott Smith, who performed the song frequently at shows:



Def Leppard!:



David Bowie:



A guy named Steve on YouTube:



Another [piano-centric] cover by Ray Davies in NYC by Ray Davies with a choral octet:



Ray Davies and Jackson Brown:



Waterloo Sunset
By Ray Davies

Dirty old river, must you keep rolling
Flowing into the night
People so busy, makes me feel dizzy
Taxi light shines so bright
But I don't need no friends
As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset
I am in paradise

Every day I look at the world from my window
But chilly, chilly is evening time
Waterloo sunset's fine

Terry meets Julie, Waterloo Station
Every Friday night
But I am so lazy, don't want to wander
I stay at home at night
But I don't feel afraid
As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset
I am in paradise

Every day I look at the world from my window
But chilly, chilly is evening time
Waterloo sunset's fine

Millions of people swarming like flies 'round Waterloo underground
But Terry and Julie cross over the river
Where they feel safe and sound
And they don't need no friends
As long as they gaze on Waterloo sunset
They are in paradise

Waterloo sunset's fine

---o0o---

President Reagan and Vladimir Putin. . .23 years ago?

By Jack Brummet
Presidential History Editor

click to enlarge

I missed this photo/controversy when it first appeared two years ago.  People seem absolutely convinced this is Vladimir Putin posing as a tourist.  The Russians vehemently deny this is him at all.  There are fairly tantalizing arguments on either side of the question.

According to Pete Souza, "President Barack Obama's official photographer, a picture he took in Red Square 21 years ago indicates that Mr Putin was part of a KGB plot to embarrass Reagan on his first ever visit to Moscow."

Kremlin officials are said to be angry about the emergence of Mr Souza's photograph, and believe it is an attempt to smear Mr Putin.  Russian experts (e.g., "experts in Russia") claim that the young man dressed in a tight t-shirt with a camera slung around his neck is not Mr Putin.

Souza told National Public Radio in the United States that the incident occurred when Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet general secretary, toured Red Square in the Summer of 1988.  Reagan was led to a group of Russian tourists who were allegedly positioned in Red Square to ask a series of pointed questions about America's human rights record.

Souza now says that a secret service officer told him the tourists were in fact "all KGB families."

"Now what is really interesting is a picture I have in my Reagan book," he said. "Off to the left is one of these tourists with a camera around his shoulder and it has been pointed out to me and verified that that was Putin. As soon as you see the picture you go: 'Oh my gosh, it really is him.'"

Experts in Moscow, however, call B.S.  During Reagan's visit, Putin was serving as a mid-ranking KGB spy in Dresden and would not have been called to Moscow to help with a dirty trick.  The Russians also note that the man in the photograph has a thicker head of hair than Mr Putin ever did.

Yeah, it does resemble the Prime Minister.  But I could really go either way. . .

---o0o---

Drawing: The Parts

By Jack Brummet

[pen and ink on 24" x 24" muslin surplus hospital drawcloth] - click to enlarge

---o0o---

Happy Flag Day!

By Mona Goldwater
Tea Party-GOP Analyst

From a Flag Day 2010 Wonkette.com post:  Here is how to display the flag with dignity:

1. Get an Army flag, too, from Big Lots or whatever. Israel flags are fine, too.
2. Throw the flag over the bar stool — the one covered in baby vomit and cheeto dust — and just lean on the American Flag, like a slob.
3. Wear pantyhose while jogging, for some reason.
4. If the flag touches the carpet, ticks could get on it. That’s not allowed according to the Constitution.

---o0o---

Alien Lore No. 209 - The Greatest Story Ever Denied

By Jack Brummet
Paranormal Editor

UFO - Greatest Story Ever Denied is an hour and a half long rundown of some of the most interesting and provocative Grey/UFO events following the Roswell crash in 1946.   One focus is the "Battle of LA," in which government forces fired upon which they thought was a UFO, but later claimed was a weather balloon. The film includes amazing photographs of Klieg lights trained on UFOs in the skies above LA and a radio broadcast describing the 1,500 rounds that were shot at the unidentified craft -- without hitting a single one! The documentary also covers some of the early military "cover-ups," and information about UFOs that researchers claim are invisible and can only be seem with infrared cameras.

"The nations of this world will have to unite for the next war will be an interplanetary war. The nations of the Earth must some day make a common front against attack by people from other planets." -- General Douglas MacArthur October 8, 1955

I try to avoid reading the comments on YouTube--generally you feel like you need a bath after reading them.  In this case, I did enjoy one commenter who suggests that the reason there has been no public acknowledgement of UFOs and Greys is that the Greys signed a mutual non-disclosure agreement with the "nations of earth."

"To me, the most compelling reason why UFOs have never been publicly acknowledged is that there must be a non-disclosure agreement between the ETs and the nations of the earth. When a nation asks "Why should we agree to not disclose your existence?" the reply might have been, "Remember the Tunguska Event?" "Yes." "We can do that on a much more massive scale. It's up to you."

"Fear is a powerful motivator."

---o0o---