If you’re confused by the title of this post, congratulations! It’s not supposed to make sense. Or is it? Peter Norvig, the Director of Research at Google, and his team analyzed their monumental library of Google books. They found 97, 565 distinct words that were mentioned more than 743 billion times. They then compiled a list of the top 50 most frequent words. Guess which ones made up the top 10? Yup-the words comprising the title of this post.

To help us understand the data, Abacaba used colorful bubbles to denote word frequency. The larger the balloon, the more popular the term. Their video reveals that “the” is the most popular English word, followed by “of,” “and,” “to,” and “in.” After presenting that information, Abacaba then groups commonly-reoccurring words together, based on the number of letters they have. This ranges from one to 20-letter terms, beginning with “a” as the most popular single-letter word and finishing with “institutionalization” as the twentieth. To learn more, check out Abacaba’s fascinating video below. (My Modern Metropolis)