Name the 100 most common nouns in modern American English. The list is adapted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English from Brigham Young University.
Though the corpus includes 160,000 texts and 450 million words from a variety of sources, you could argue that some words are overrepresented due to the proportion of texts. For example, only 85 million words in the corpus are transcripts of spoken English from radio programs or television shows. That's only about 19% of the total. At the same time, another 81 million words were taken from academic journals, roughly the same percentage. I believe that's likely why there is an over representation of certain words like "education" compared to what we might guess, given that most of our guesses are probably based on spoken English and not words we'd find in academic journals.
That's because the sample of the research is skewed. They analyze what's writen in the newspapers, but not what's said at home. Obviously, "brother" and "sister" are much more commonly used in English than "education" and "government". They are just lest used in the very specific texts they have bothered to study.
Interesting quiz. Palmfaced when I saw the full list, so many obvious words. FYI - You've got the word "other" and the word "others" in the quiz. Since there aren't any other plurals that I noticed, I'm assuming it's unintentional. Huzzah.
It's not unintentional I was just copying from the list they came up with. I noticed the same thing myself and I'm not sure why there is a discrepancy there.
It's an honor to be featured on the front page. I deleted some previous comments of mine because I figured out how to make hypertext links. If you enjoyed this quiz and want to take some similar quizzes I made these:
A very curious list! There’s an end with no beginning or start, there’s a question with no answer, life without death, a girl with no boy, a friend with no enemy, war without peace, right with no wrong (or left), a back but no front, etc. Just sayin. I wonder how the people that made the list defined "common".
it's based on how often the words appeared in the corpus. The corpus is a collection of many different texts of various origin, mostly written English but some transcripts of spoken English as well.
Good point. My bad on the numbers not matching. There were actually 18 words on their list not included on yours, and 20 on yours that weren't on the COCA site. So I guess I counted wrong and came up with 16 instead of 18. Then also they had a "$" and "Mr." for two of their "words". Forgot to count those two as part of their 20. So 16 plus the two I missed plus their two non-words makes 20.
Not sure what you did but the site says it was last updated in the summer of 2012 and your quiz looks like it was created in April 2013. Didn't really mean to come across as upset.
Not that big of a deal though really. I'm just going to delete the other comment. Happy trails.
It's okay I appreciate the feedback. I was going off of an article based on the corpus which I believe was published shortly before the last update, so if you're right then it maybe have been out of date by a year. I just couldn't figure out how to generate a useful list using the corpus website itself... I could only get sample lists that gave every 10th or 100th word..
I agree it's tough. Average score is 15/100, while average on the Most Common Words quiz is 40/100. Both have the same time limit. My biggest concern with adding more time is that people would simply get bored after six minutes. I think it's probably okay as is and you can always turn off the timer if you want to spend more time guessing. Personally I think there is enough room on the site for some quizzes that are very easy and others that are very hard.
I *am* agreeable to the idea of updating this, though, if you will share how you are generating lists of top 100 results. I've tried doing this at the corpus website and for whatever reason I can only figure out how to get lists that display every 10th result, which would make updating very tedious. If I could get a newer or more accurate list of the top 100 now I would use it. Thanks again for the feedback.
Played this a while ago and had about 30 right answers. Played it again now and had about the same number, but an almost completely different list of right answers :) Guess it shows the mood I'm in when I play this... Great quiz!
I'm glad the average score isn't high, or else I would be in trouble. Right now it's only 16, but somehow I managed to get 20. I guess we say girl more often than we say boy. Can't believe I missed car, but got others, education, health, and government, which are all under 10%, while car is over 70%. It's kind of sad. I would have never guessed service though.
Wow! Surprising answers...made for a neat quiz. I ashamed I couldn't even get half of them...then again, I'm shocked something like 'half' wasn't one of the answers!
Honestly, when I'm in a situation where I need to think of a word, any word, "book" is usually one of the first to come to mind. Maybe because it's usually one of the first words you learn when studying a foreign language, so now I just think of it as the default word lol.
hard to imagine that the word "issue" is used more than some that didnt make the list, like baby, brother, sister, girlfriend boyfriend, television, phone, drink(s), BEER!
Why don't you make your own corpus (you have to have one to make this possible) exclusively based on daily spoken English, and your own quiz, if you're unhappy with this one. The source is listed. You could look at it, and see what it's based on. Then you wouldn't have to be confused about what "common" means and then you'd have no reason to complain.
You just said that it can be used as a noun. Such as a room with books and a desk. Or, given that much of the corpus is made up of academic texts, I assume there are many cases where it's used like: "the study concluded that Margles' inference is unfounded."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_of_Contemporary_American_English
Though the corpus includes 160,000 texts and 450 million words from a variety of sources, you could argue that some words are overrepresented due to the proportion of texts. For example, only 85 million words in the corpus are transcripts of spoken English from radio programs or television shows. That's only about 19% of the total. At the same time, another 81 million words were taken from academic journals, roughly the same percentage. I believe that's likely why there is an over representation of certain words like "education" compared to what we might guess, given that most of our guesses are probably based on spoken English and not words we'd find in academic journals.
http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
Common English Verbs
Common English Adjectives
If you're still looking for more quizzes after that, here are a few more of my personal favorites that don't get as much traffic as some others:
Smartest Countries
Censorship Around the World
Oldest Cities by Country
Enjoy
Good point. My bad on the numbers not matching. There were actually 18 words on their list not included on yours, and 20 on yours that weren't on the COCA site. So I guess I counted wrong and came up with 16 instead of 18. Then also they had a "$" and "Mr." for two of their "words". Forgot to count those two as part of their 20. So 16 plus the two I missed plus their two non-words makes 20.
Not sure what you did but the site says it was last updated in the summer of 2012 and your quiz looks like it was created in April 2013. Didn't really mean to come across as upset.
Not that big of a deal though really. I'm just going to delete the other comment. Happy trails.
Or... not.