TIL "fucking" is the 214th most popular word in the English language.
The Long Tail of the English Language
21–30 of 55 posts
Re: The Long Tail of the English Language
#22So I'm wondering, if you just learned the 200 most popular words, you might get pretty far in learning a new language, no?
I took exactly this approach to learning passable German when I lived there a couple months. Unfortunately, most Germans would much rather practice their English on you than let you practice German on them. So I gave up and let them.
Re: The Long Tail of the English Language
#23I'm guessing "icing" is more popular in Canada.
Only if you're thinking of icing on roads (or in hockey), but not if you're thinking of icing on top of a cake.
Re: The Long Tail of the English Language
#24If you have the right kind of friends you can play "Who knows the most obscure word?". Everyone picks a word from memory, check each word's position (We used to use google ngrams, but this would work well.), whoever gets the least common word wins that round, repeat until it's not fun anymore. That's how I learned defenestrate, obsequious, and a few other words.
First word I tried wasn't even present in the list (equivocate). How do you score that?
Equivocate came up in https://books.google.com/ngrams. Looks like the linked tool isn't quite up for it after all.
Re: The Long Tail of the English Language
#25I wonder how other languages compare to English. I know English is far from pure. "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -- James Nicoll
What do you mean by "pure"? Lack of loanwoards? Lack of any linguistic changes (e.g., sound, meaning) for existing words? Lack of any innovation, i.e. no new words for new concepts/objects? You could try to find some of these things in languages spoken by rather isolated groups. Yet I don't think one should call such a language "pure", implying some kind or (moral) superiority.
Re: The Long Tail of the English Language
#26'I' doesn't seem to work. It is very common. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=I%2C+you&year_...
Should be fixed now.
Re: The Long Tail of the English Language
#27If you have the right kind of friends you can play "Who knows the most obscure word?". Everyone picks a word from memory, check each word's position (We used to use google ngrams, but this would work well.), whoever gets the least common word wins that round, repeat until it's not fun anymore. That's how I learned defenestrate, obsequious, and a few other words.
"Kajagoogoo" is the 96,714th most common word in the English language.
Re: The Long Tail of the English Language
#28If you have the right kind of friends you can play "Who knows the most obscure word?". Everyone picks a word from memory, check each word's position (We used to use google ngrams, but this would work well.), whoever gets the least common word wins that round, repeat until it's not fun anymore. That's how I learned defenestrate, obsequious, and a few other words.
"Kajagoogoo" is the 96,714th most common word in the English language.
That's cuz it's so shy...
Re: The Long Tail of the English Language
#29Now I understand somewhat better why I often end up ceasing midway through discourse, as my colloquists often end up interjecting requesting definition of whatever neologism has just emanated from lexicon into conversation.... a random sampling of words that I have just today been asked to define either do not feature in this list at all, or are 90,000+ in terms of use. Brobdingnagian, deleterious, autodidact, loquaciousness... are these really such strange vernacular?
I suppose this is what happens when you spend your formative years buried in literature - it probably doesn't help that I mispronounce all sorts, as books make poor elocutionists.
I do worry that as we further and further consolidate our vocabulary that we lose the breadth and depth of thought that nuanced words provide... so did Orwell...
Re: The Long Tail of the English Language
#30For a corpus much more complete on the long tail, try google books ngram viewer : https://books.google.com/ngrams . That uses full data from google's book-scanning endeavors, millions of books compared to millions of words in the originally linked article.
I love to play with this, and see how thought waxes and wanes - a good one is to stick in every soviet premier since Lenin, or 20th c. US presidents - really tells you rather a bit about the mindshare that these individuals had.