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.),
Letter frequency word variants when counting, such as "abstracts", "abstracted" and "abstracting" and not just the root word of "abstract". This system results in letters like "s" appearing much more frequently, such as when counting letters from lists of the most used English words on the Internet. A final variant is to count letters based on their frequency of use in actual texts, resulting in certain letter combinations like "th" becoming more common due to the frequent use of common words like "the". Absolute usage frequency measures like this are used when creating keyboard layouts or letter frequencies in old fashioned printing