Perhaps it was the only one of the match? Or maybe it was the clincher that won the league? Context very often determines sense. The inclusion of ‘the’ immediately signals something important about that goal. So even someone with a rudimentary grasp of English can tell the difference between ‘I ate an apple’ and ‘I ate the apple’.īut although ‘the’ has no meaning in itself, “it seems to be able to do things in subtle and miraculous ways,” says Michael Rosen, poet and author. Consider the difference between ‘he scored a goal’ and ‘he scored the goal’. Helping us understand what is being referred to, ‘the’ makes sense of nouns as a subject or an object. This is typical, explains Gary Thoms, assistant professor in linguistics at New York University: “a super high-usage word will often develop a real flexibility”, with different subtle uses that make it hard to define. Words are split into two categories: expressions with a semantic meaning and functional words like ‘the’, ‘to’, ‘for’, with a job to do. The second reason is that ‘the’ lies at the heart of English grammar, having a function rather than a meaning. He predicted that short and simple words would be the most frequent – and he was right. George Zipf, a 20th-Century US linguist and philologist, expounded the principle of least effort. But why is this? The answer is two-fold, according to the BBC Radio 4 programme Word of Mouth. “‘The’ really is miles above everything else,” says Jonathan Culpeper, professor of linguistics at Lancaster University. ‘The’ tops the league tables of most frequently used words in English, accounting for 5% of every 100 words used. The surprising history of the word ‘dude’ This story was originally published in January 2020. And yet this bland and innocuous-seeming word could be one of the most potent in the English language. It isn’t descriptive, evocative or inspiring. It’s omnipresent we can’t imagine English without it.

Word vs word concept