Poor old Pope. He has lost his standing in the written word. So says Matjaž Perc at the University of Maribor in Slovenia, who has identified the most common words used in 5.2 million books published over five centuries.

Perc used data collected by Google for the company’s Ngram Viewer application – a tool that lets users see the changing popularity of certain written words over time. Once he had downloaded data for books published between 1520 and 2008, he used an algorithm to search for the most commonly used words and groups of words in each year.

The most popular words stayed the same. “The” was top in both 1520 and 2008. Common groups of words have changed, though. The most common three-word phrase in 2008 was “one of the”; in 1520, it was “of the Pope”. References to religion featured heavily in early literature, Perc notes. For example, “the Pope and his followers”, “the laws of the Church” and “the body and blood of Christ” all feature in the 10 most popular five-word phrases of 1520. By 2008, the most frequently written five-word phrases were along the lines of “at the end of the”, “in the middle of the” and “on the other side of”.

A closer inspection of the changing use of English words revealed that, while changes in popularity of some words were quite dramatic during the 16th and 17th centuries, rankings have stayed pretty constant in the 20th and 21st centuries. That said, recently the words “United States” have increased in popularity.


“It seems English writing has reached a mature state,” says Perc. “There is a statistical coming of age of the language.”

Because the most frequently written words are changing little over the years, the English language might be particularly easy to learn, says Perc. “If phrases reappear in a book, it’s easier to follow,” he says. “In China, where globalisation is still taking place, there’s still a lot of change in the language, and that probably makes it harder to learn.”

Journal reference: Royal Society Interface, DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2012.0491