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.),
English words of Greek origin to recognize words of Greek origin, and give hints as to their pronunciation and inflection. Some romanizations are not completely standard. The Ancient Greek diphthongs and may be spelled in three different ways in English: the digraphs "ae" and "oe"; the ligatures "æ" and "œ"; and the simple letter "e". The ligatures have largely fallen out of use worldwide; the digraphs are uncommon in American usage, but remain common in British usage. The spelling depends mostly on the variety of English, not on the particular word. Examples are: "encyclopaedia" / "encyclopædia" / "encyclopedia", "haemoglobin" / "hæmoglobin" / "hemoglobin", "oedema" /