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.),
Interrogative word and "-soever", as in "whoso" and "whomsoever".) These words have the following main meanings: Some of these words have also developed independent meanings, such as "however" as an adverb meaning "nonetheless"; "whatsoever" as an emphatic adverb used with "no", "none", "any", "nothing", etc. ("I did nothing wrong whatsoever"); and "whatever" in its slang usage. A frequent class of interrogative words in several other languages is the interrogative verb: Interrogative word An interrogative word or question word is a function word used to ask a question, such as "what", "when", "where", "who", "whom", "why", and "how". They are sometimes called wh-words,