English language

English originated in Anglo-Saxo

See also Language and etymology

English word origin

Angles / Anglo-Saxon

• from the Angles, a Germanic peoples who migrated to the British Islands in the 400s-600s AD.
  • part of the Anglo-Saxon invasions
• English is one of the "Anglo-Frisian" languages

Language origins of Modern English

Origins of Modern English

Germanic	Old French	Latin	Greek	Other	Proper Names
26%	29%	29%	6%	6%	4%

The most common words in English

1. the
2. be
3. to
4. and
5. a
6. in
7. that
8. have
9. I
10. it

• from: Most common words in English - Wikipedia

notes & statistics

• of the top 20 most common words, 7 are prepositions
• the top 200 words constitute 50-60% of words used commonly used
  • see: Is there a frequency of the use of different parts of speech in English? - Stack Exchange

English synonymous & part of speech word use

• the English language has a huge number of words that have multiple definitions
• other languages may be more explicit with distinct words that English will cover with a single word.
• for example:

English words & parts of speech distribution

• English contains about 600,000 words
  • as counted by the Oxford English Dictionary, there are 171,476 words in current use and 47,156 obsolete words
    • the Dictionary also counts 250,000 "distinct" words, excluding inflections (word ending changes)
  • when word definitions are counted, English has 1,402,895 words
    • i.e., the word "love" generally has five definitions in the dictionary
  • when counting "headwords" and "lemmas" (words produced from a headword), English has 578,707 words
    • "headword" = a word from which other words are derived, such as "break > broken > broke
  • see
    • How many words are there in the Engli... | Oxford Dictionaries (archive.org)
    • Corpus linguistics - Wikipedia
    • Which Language Has The Most Words? (babbel.com)
    • List of dictionaries by number of words - Wikipedia

parts of speech as percentage of all words

• in general, English consists of
  • Adjectives: 25%
  • Nouns: 50%
  • Verbs: 7%
    • see: How Many Words are in the Oxford English Dictionary? * alphaDictionary

parts of speech as percentage of word usage, conversational v. formal/academic:

English Language Percent Frequency of Use of Parts of Speech

	Adjectives	Adverbs	Conjunctions	Determiners	Nouns	Prepositions	Pronouns	Verbs
Conversational	2.5%	5%	4.5%	4.5%	15%	5.5%	16.5%	12.5%
Formal/ Academic	10%	3%	5%	10%	30%	15%	4%	10%
	Adjectives	Adverbs			Nouns			Verbs

• source: The 9 Parts of Speech in English | Ginseng English (from Biber, et. al., (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English.)