Noun and out

The time has come to examine the nouns that the average person uses most in a day, a year, or even perhaps a whole life.

The Oxford University Press (OUP) has furnished a list which showed that “time” is the commonest, “person” comes second, with “year” in third place and “day” in fifth, well ahead of “life”, which comes ninth. Day is pushed out of fourth place by “way”; but “way” is a bit of a cheat, since the Oxford experts say it has 18 separate meanings.
The words at the top of the list are mostly severely practical, and as you’d expect with the severely practical, most of them are Old English.
British author Melvyn Bragg, in his bestselling book The Adventure of English, has a different list of commonest words from Oxford’s: the top noun in his collection is “word”. but both sources agree on two essentials: the dominance of Old English roots, and the preference for short words over long ones.
OUP’s list of nouns has a tang about it of “how we live now”. “Man”, as the Oxford team notes, comes seventh, “child” 12th and “woman” only 14th. “Work” is 16th, but “rest” and “play” don’t make the top 20 — a reminder, perhaps, that “time” is what most people complain they are always short of.
“War” is 49th; “peace” doesn’t make the top 100. The OUP’s project manager, Angus Stevenson, thinks words score well if they occur, as “time” does, in familiar phrases: perhaps “case” (18th) and “point” (19th) are cases in point.
Significantly, the longest of the list’s leading nouns is the 20th – “government”.

Word facts

• “Dreamt” is the only word that ends in the letters “mt”.
• The symbol on the “pound” key (#) is called an octothorpe.
• The word “set” has more definitions than any other word in the English language.
• “Underground” is the only word that begins and ends with the letters “und.”
• The longest word in the English language is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.