Most common words in English about half of all written English. According to a study cited by Robert McCrum in "The Story of English," all of the first hundred of the most common words in English are of Anglo-Saxon origin, except for "people", ultimately from Latin "populus", and "because", in part from Latin "causa". Some lists of common words distinguish between word forms, while others rank all forms of a word as a single lexeme (the form of the word as it would appear in a dictionary). For example, the lexeme "be" (as in "to be") comprises all its conjugations ("is", "was", "are", "were", etc.),
Three letter rule and "ka". Carney calls such words "exceptions which prove the rule, clearly marked as exotic by the spelling". Three letter rule In English spelling, the three letter rule (or short word rule) is the observation that one- and two-letter words tend to be function words such as "I", "at", "he", "if", "of", "or", etc. As a consequence of the rule, "content words" tend to have at least three letters. In particular, content words containing fewer than three phonemes may be augmented with letters which are phonetically redundant, such as "ebb, "add, "egg, "inn, "bee, "awe, "buy", "owe", etc. Many content