Readers reply: what is the most common word in the world?

"According to the Oxford English Corpus, the is top of the anglophone pops. Not surprisingly, no features on the OEC's hot 100, but not yes (neither of which make the grade in the Irish language, which has no equivalents). EddieChorepost Wait, are you saying Irish has no word for yes or no? How does that work? How do you answer simple questions? How do you express agreement or disagreement? How does a two-year-old child say anything at all if not no?"

"TopGyre I would have guessed the. Would you count le, la and les as separate words? And what about languages such as Russian, which, I believe, lacks a definite article? Hilary AJ In English it would be the, from collections of written works. Translations as le, la, les, el, os, der and so on in the most widely used European languages would probably rank the word highly, too. Yet eastern languages such as Chinese and Japanese don't have a direct equivalent. Are westerners wastefully overusing an unnecessary word?"

"leadballoon If we're talking about words as a noise or vocalisation then la is up there. It's a definite article in French and Spanish, and it's an informal sentence ending in Cantonese so it could be the most common human noise. MattPerry2679 Er. annamayo In spoken English, my money's on like. EddieChorepost From conversations I hear around me on the street, on the bus, etc, I am, like, certain that like is the most common word in spoken English among people aged, like, six to 40."

The definite article 'the' ranks as the most frequent word in English. Definite-article forms such as le, la, les, el, os and der frequently appear high in word-frequency lists for many European languages. Some languages, including Russian, lack a definite-article system, and eastern languages such as Chinese and Japanese have no direct equivalent. Irish lacks single-word equivalents for yes and no and uses other grammatical strategies for affirmation and negation. Spoken communication can show different high-frequency items, with fillers and discourse particles like like or la dominating conversational speech in some age groups and communities.

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