What even is this crazy tongue we speak?
First off, the Oxford English Corpus currently contains over 2 billion words.
OH MY GOD SO MANY.
The average person, though, is likely to know only about 50,000 of them.
New Line Cinema / Via giphy.com
That might be because the ten most common lemmas (base forms of a word) in English make up 25% of all words used.
Those lemmas are the, be, to, of, and, a, in, that, have, and I.
Seriously, just try to write a paragraph that doesn't contain any form of those words.
BuzzFeed
Words have lifespans that can range from fewer than 1,000 years up to 20,000 years.
A word like "throw" is expected to have a lifespan of about 1,000 years, while words like "I" and "who" are likely to reach the 20,000 year mark.
BuzzFeed
