most commonly used noun

Time's up for common noun usage
(c)AAP 2006 Friday Jun 23 19:44 AEST
Time is the most commonly used noun in the English language, a study has found. A survey by researchers at Oxford University Press revealed English speakers as a society of clock-watchers. Year features comes in at No.3 and day is fifth. Oxford University Press English Dictionaries Department project manager Catherine Soanes suggested the list also had an all work and no play flavour. "I think it does reflect the way that time is so important in our society," Ms Soanes told Australian Associated Press "It shows how much our lives are determined by work and time and things like that because we don't even have play or rest in the top 100 words." Work was No.16, week 17, government 20 and company 21. Ms Soanes also said the use of the word time in phrases like "one-time", "time after time", "last time" and "in time" had contributed to it being the most used noun." The list appears as a supplement entitled "English Uncovered" in the Revised 11th Edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. It was compiled from a survey of a database called the Oxford English Corpus, which contains one billion words. The corpus includes academic journals and on-line resources, Internet chatrooms and blogs, giving a broad picture of English language usage. "It's a database of international English so it doesn't restrict it to British English," Ms Soanes said. "It's a reflection of English as a global language." The word problem was 24th on the list, while solution was nowhere to be seen, and war was No.49 but peace failed to make it into the top 100. "It's a sort of reflection of our society in some ways," Ms Soanes said. And could it be that it's a man's world? The word man was No.7, followed by child at No.12 and woman 14th. Ms Soanes said this could be explained by the fact that man was used in many common phrases such as mankind and was often used to mean people in general rather than identifying a specific gender. The 100 most commonly used words - as opposed to most commonly used nouns - were functional, such as the, be and to.