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.),
Word ladder be connected with a word ladder. Knuth used a fixed collection of 5,757 of the most common English five-letter words, excluding proper nouns. He determined exactly when two words of the collection had a word ladder between them via other words in the collection. Knuth found that most words were connected to each other, and he also found that 671 words of the collection did not form a word ladder with any other words. He called these words "aloof", because "aloof" is itself an example of such a word. Word ladder Word ladder (also known as Doublets, word-links, change-the-word puzzles,