in english, a simple sentence with a verb (an action), subject (who or what is doing the action), and an object (to whom or what the action is done) is written with a subject-verb-object word order (svo). for example, in the sentence "robert opens the door", "robert" is the subject, "opens" is the verb and "door" is the object. svo is the second-most common word order among all languages and is used in 42% of them. examples are mandarin chinese, bahasa melayu, bahasa indonesia, spanish, french, italian, thai and vietnamese. while some of the above languages can use other word orders, such as sov and vso, they use svo for the simplest sentences.