The 100 most used words in Britain have been revealed; three of them are very strange

WORDS such as “yes”, “so”, “oh” and “like” are among the 100 most used words in Britain, researchers say.

At the top of the list are 'the', 'its', 'and', 'a' and 'of'.

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But the 5,000-strong list even includes 'Victorian', 'Sydney' and 'Belgium', which occur about 13 times per million words.

They are part of a dictionary compiled by Lancaster University professor of corpus linguistics Vaclav Brezina and lecturer Dr. Dana Gablasova.

They analyzed a dataset of 100 million words covering a wide range of genres of spoken and written English, including informal speechfiction, newspapers, academic writing and e-language.

The book – A Frequency Dictionary of British English – helps identify different word usages that are essential for both language learners and researchers interested in words found in real-world contexts.

Professor Brezina said: “Words can tell us fascinating stories about how we live, what we value and how we think about the world.

“This dictionary provides detailed insights into the use of English words in a number of contexts, a social geography of language, if you will.”

The dictionary is based on extensive research into existing British English using the British National Corpus 2014 – a representative corpus of 100 million words developed at Lancaster University.

Researchers used a new tool – known as #LancsBox

Professor Brezina added: “Dictionaries have been a lifetime of work, but now technology, including this groundbreaking tool, will bring language research and language computation together to make it so much easier.

“This is the future of lexicography: automated and semi-automated processes that will revolutionize the way we produce dictionaries, grammar books and teaching materials.

“Not only can we accurately describe the usage and meaning of words, #LancsBox

“As the saying suggests, a picture can sometimes say more than a thousand words.”