No good writer writes without the assistance of a great dictionary and thesaurus. From the first word to the last word, a writer struggles to find the right word — whether it is a new word or and old word, a little word, or a long word — to express his or own thoughts and feelings. Finding the right word, as opposed to any other imprecise word, is very important to a writer. This is best expressed by the playwright, Michael Mackenzie, who writes: “People often forget the sheer joy of finding the right word which expresses a thought is extraordinary, an emotional rush of an intense kind.” Thanks to an analysis of the Oxford English Corpus, containing more than 2 billion words, linguists can determine the ten most common adjectives in the English language (careful readers may have identified that those ten words were used in the first three sentences):
1. Good
2. New
3. First
4. Last
5. Long
6. Great
7. Little
8. Own
9. Other
10. Old
Read related posts: Most Common Writing Errors
Best English Dictionary
Most Common Words in English
For further reading: The Book of Word Records by Asher Cantrell, Adams Media (2013)
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