(BE5) Rob Waring's web site (http://www.robwaring.org/) provides some interesting and sobering facts concerning how much reading is necessary to encounter new words. A quote will be given, then the link to the site will be given.
"...the most common word in English is the. It appears so frequently that it appears on average every 17th word and covers about 5.83% of the total volume of English (1). The next most frequent word is the be verb and its inflections (was, were, are, am, is etc). be appears once every 20 words (you would have also met the of course). If you want to meet all the top 25 most frequent words in English statistically speaking (but of course not in reality) you'd have to read about 225 of text. To meet the first 1000 most frequent words in English you'd need to read 8533. The and be would have been repeated hundreds of times in this volume of text but it would take you 8553 words just to meet the 1000th word once. To meet the 2,000th which occupies 0.00432% of the volume of English or occurs once every 23,1003 words. However, you are only meeting the 2000th word once. If you want to meet it again, you'd have to read another 23,103 words" The bolding is mine for emphasis. More of these statistics are in the link below.
http://www.robwaring.org/er/ER_info/how_much_er.htm
Rob's site covers more than vocabulary. Please take a look.
Reflections on Bblep09
15 years ago
