Discovering Prime Words

To find out what the most commonly used words are, my com-

pany, The Literacy Company, downloaded all the books available

on Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org), the online digital

library consisting of more than 13,000 books (about 548 million

words altogether). We entered all the books in a database and then

queried the database to find out the 2,000 most popular words.

I call these words prime words because they’re the primary words

you encounter in your reading. Based on our experiment with

Project Guttenberg, these prime words represent 75 percent of all

the words in the English language. That means that you can master

the prime words and rest assured that you know 75 percent of the

vocabulary words you need in your reading.

After you get the prime words down, your reading comprehension,

retention, and recall increase because knowing the prime words

gives you these advantages in your reading:

 ✓ You recognize the words immediately, so you don’t have to

decode them.

 ✓ Your eyes don’t fixate on the words (so you can read them as

part of word groups)