Lists of Common Words
These lists of high-frequency words are drawn from various sources, and mainly based on a national corpus (British or American). A corpus is a collection of texts and recorded speech consisting of tens of millions of words. From such a large volume of data, it is possible to calculate the frequency with which words occur in a language. Inevitably, not all corpuses are identical or agree with one another, and you may notice minor differences in frequency or rank within these lists. Such differences are insignificant.
These lists are indicative only and actual words may change over time.