As a social demographer, I always have an eye out for interesting sources of data about human social life. This particular source is a little bit of a stretch, but I found it very interesting nonetheless -- WordCount, a search engine and ranking of the most commonly used words in the English language. In case you’re dying of curiosity, 86,800 in their database, the top ten most commonly used English words are:

1. The
2. Of
3. And
4. To
5. A
6. In
7. That
8. It
9. Is
10. Was

The highest-ranking two-syllable word is “about” (#55) and the highest-ranking three syllable word is “government” (#140). I was a little disappointed to see that two words that I commonly use didn’t rank higher: “bogus” (#14,606) and “dude” (#35,307).

Bogus, dude.