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The 100 most common words in Britain revealed and three of them are strange

When you think of commonly used words, "Victorian" and "Belgium" probably don't come to mind. But it turns out the most popular words in the country are more random than you think

[The most common words in Britain have been revealed ]

The most common words in Britain have been revealed (Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)

The most commonly used words in Britain have officially been revealed and some of them are a bit odd.

Words like "yeah", "so" and "like" are among the 100 most-used words in Britain. According to researchers, the terms that topped the list included "the", "be", "and", "a" and "of".

The list, which contains 5,000 words, also includes "Victorian", "Sydney" and "Belgium", which are said to crop up around 13 times per one million words. It all came about after a dictionary was put together by Lancaster Universitys professor of corpus linguistics Vaclav Brezina and lecturer Dr Dana Gablasova.

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The team studied a 100million-word dataset that includes a variety of genres of spoken and written English. It covers informal speech, fiction, newspapers, academic writing and e-language.

The book A Frequency Dictionary of British English looks at the different uses of words that are considered vital for both language learners and researchers who have an interest in words occurring in real contexts.

[The most common words in Britain have been revealed ]

An extensive study was carried out to uncover the facts (Image: Getty Images)

Professor Brezina told The Sun: "Words can tell us fascinating stories about how we live, what we find important and how we think about the world. This dictionary provides detailed insights into the use of English words across a number of contexts, a social geography of language, if you like."

To put the book together, the experts carried out detailed research on existing British-English by studying the British National Corpus 2014 a 100 million word representative corpus developed at Lancaster University. They also used a new technique referred to as #LancsBox X, which was personally designed by a team at Lancaster University - to analyse the data.

Professor Brezina added: "Dictionaries were a lifetime's work but now technology, including this cutting-edge tool, will bring together language research and computation to make it so much easier. This is the future of lexicography - automated and semi-automated processes, which will radically alter the way we produce dictionaries, grammar books and teaching materials.

"Also, not only can we accurately describe the uses and meanings of words, using #LancsBox X we can also easily visualise word associations and the connections between words, allowing us to directly witness the intricate structure of language.

"As the saying suggests, a picture can sometimes be worth a thousand words."

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