There's no single "most popular word of all time" because it depends on language and context, but "OK" is a strong contender for the most universally understood and used across languages, while in English specifically, function words like "the," "be," "to," "of," and "and" dominate overall usage due to their grammatical necessity, though nouns like "time," "person," and "year" are very frequent content words, according to English corpus data, notes Oxford English Corpus data.
The most common words in the English language are typically function words such as 'the', 'be', 'to', 'of', 'and', 'a', 'in', 'that', 'have', and 'I'.
The 190,000-letter "word" is the full chemical name for the protein titin (also called connectin), starting with Methionylthreonylthreonyl... and ending with ...isoleucine, detailing its immense chain of amino acids. While technically a word, it's a systematic scientific name (not in dictionaries) that's impractically long, taking hours to pronounce, and scientists use the short name "titin" instead.
The word with 645 meanings is "run," according to the Oxford English Dictionary. This number refers specifically to the verb form, making it the most complex word in English, surpassing the former record-holder, "set". Its vast meanings range from physical movement to operating machines, managing businesses, and extending in a direction, a versatility that grew with societal changes like the Industrial Revolution.
The 15 most unusual words you'll ever find in English
These words are: thou, I, not, that, we, to give, who, this, what, man/male, ye, old, mother, to hear, hand, fire, to pull, black, to flow, bark, ashes, to spit, worm.
“Eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious” is a 30-letter adjective that means “very good or fine.” It's one of the longest words in English. For example, “The chef's special dessert was nothing short of eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious—a truly delightful treat!”
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (45 letters) is significantly longer than hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia (36 letters), with the former being the longest word in major dictionaries, describing a lung disease, while the latter ironically names the fear of long words.
Tricky words in English often involve confusing spellings, silent letters, or subtle meaning differences, with examples including homophones like there/their/they're, spelling challenges like accommodate (double letters) and rhythm (no vowels), and usage confusion such as imply vs. infer, bring vs. take, and sight words like was, are, and the that don't follow phonetic rules. These words can trip up both learners and native speakers due to pronunciation discrepancies or similar forms with distinct meanings.
methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylarginyl… At over 180,000 letters long, the chemical name of the protein titin is often said to technically be the longest English word. If spoken out loud, this word takes over three hours to say!
Most commonly, length is based on orthography (conventional spelling rules) and counting the number of written letters. Alternate, but less common, approaches include phonology (the spoken language) and the number of phonemes (sounds).
Yes, “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious “ is in all the major English dictionaries. It was originally a made-up word from “Mary Poppins,” but it has been adapted in English to mean extraordinarily good, wonderful.
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is the longest word in the English language published in a popular dictionary, Oxford Dictionaries, which defines it as "an artificial long word said to mean a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine ash and sand dust".
Some babies' first words come from the animal kingdom - in Spain, the most uncommon first word is 'panther' while in Canada it's 'goose'! The most obscure first word for Australian babies is 'country' - which is even more unusual than 'jam' as their most popular first word!
OK is frequently used as a loanword in other languages. It has been described as the most frequently spoken or written word on the planet.
Intralexical factors can also influence a lexical item's learning burden, including pronounceability, orthography, morphology, synformy, and semantic features (e.g., abstractness, register, idiomaticity, and polysemy; Laufer, 1997) .
(Did you count only 20 words in the list? The 21st is hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, which is fear of long words. Apologies to anyone who suffers from this condition with its 36-letter name—we're sure we've made it worse.)
Ten powerful words often used in marketing and communication to grab attention and drive action include Free, New, Discover, Save, Guarantee, You, Health, Proven, Safety, and Results, while words like Love, Courage, Patience, and Inspire hold deep emotional power, and others like Meraki (doing something with soul) or Ephemeral (short-lived) offer unique descriptive strength, with the best choice depending on context.
The longest chemical compound known to us till date is a 'Protein'.The chemical formula for the protein is C169723H270464N45688O52243S912.Scientists call the protein: Titin.
The extended term for “titin” has 189,819 letters, but the first 61 letters are methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylarginyltyrosylglutamylsery. It takes three or more hours to pronounce the entire word. Titin is the body's largest known protein that maintains muscular passive elasticity.
lollygagging is a wonderful word to describe idle time or dawdling, dilly- dallying, slowing down, and basically allowing yourself some good, old-fashioned downtime.
▸ adjective: (slang) Causing a desire to vomit; disgusting or gross. Similar: barfulous, stomach-turning, barfalicious, sick, detestable, gross, sick to one's stomach, obnoxious, monstrocious, vituperous, more...
Supposedly, the word was taken from Maurice Weseen's “Dictionary of American Slang”. In it “eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious” is also defined as “very good / very fine” and is left without further comments regarding its origin or terms of use.