II discovered an interesting website recently: wordcount.org. The site claims to have taken the 86,800 most common words in the English language and ordered them by frequency of use. It’s no surprise that the top ten words are, in order, ‘the’, ‘of’, ‘and’, ‘to’, ‘a’, ‘in’, ‘that’, ‘it’, ‘is’, ‘was’. Overcome by curiosity, I began typing in words to see how they ranked. ‘Mack’ is number 26,453. ‘Beer’ is 2,927. ‘Wine’ is more common at 1,634 (though I would have thought beer, the common man’s drink, would be more popular).

Then I typed in ‘lithography’ (the subject of my profession). I was shocked at the result: #42,832. There are 42,831 words in English that are more commonly used than ‘lithography’! Obviously, that is not true in my household, but could I be so out of touch with the rest of the world that I didn’t realize that lithography is in the bottom half of word popularity?

I decided to look at the few words just above ‘lithography’ on the list. Here they are.

42,826 luqa
42,827 calculi
42,828 tiverton
42,829 kaysone
42,830 sciorto
42,831 bullingdon
42,832 lithography

Are they kidding me? A word with a ‘q’ not followed by a ‘u’ is more popular than ‘lithography’? The only word I even remotely recognize from this list is the plural of calculus, and I can truthfully say that I believe that one calculus is enough. Is my field of study and work, the field that I have devoted the last 25 years of my life to, really this obscure? I guess so.

By the way, Luqa is a small village in Malta. Tiverton is an English town in Devon (as well as a New English town in Rhode Island). Kaysone is the first name of Kaysone Phomvihane, a former prime minister of Loas. Sciorto is an Italian family name. Bullingdon is an area of land in Oxfordshire, England, known as a “hundred”. The Bullingdon Club (or Bullingdon Dining Club) is a top-secret Oxford student drinking club for the super-rich. (Thank you, Google.) I look forward to using these words in conversation soon. I suspect there are a lot of words above ‘lithography’ on the list that I’ll need to learn.

But wait, there is more on this subject that must be told. Could there have been a measurement error? Stay tuned…