Each language has a well-established set of word frequencies. In
most documents in English, "the" is the commonest word, "of" is
often second, and so on. These very common words tell you
nothing about the content of a document: all they do is get in
the way, and slow down the analysis. Therefore most word-
frequency analysis software ignores the commonest words - they
are referred to as "stopwords". Audience Dialogue uses two lists
of stopwords, for different kinds of project. Usually we ignore
the commonest 20 words, sometimes the commonest 180 (e.g. when
considering content rather than expression, as in answers to
open-ended questions in a survey). The following short list is
based on the LOB Corpus of words most commonly used in English.
(The LOB Corpus was counted in the 1960s, but there's no reason
to expect the very commonest words to have changed since then.)
The top 20 words are - along with their average frequency per
1000 words... For most purposes you can ignore these stopwords,
but for other purpos