Learning to Read the 100 Most Important Words*

Rhetorician I.A. Richards (1893-1979) called them the most important words for two reasons:

1. They cover the ideas we can least avoid using, those which are concerned in all that we do as thinking begins.


2. They are words we are forced to use in explaining other words because it is in terms of the ideas they cover that the meanings of other words must be given.
   (How to Read a Page: A Course in Effective Reading, With an Introduction to a Hundred Great Words, W. W. Norton, 1942)

And here are those important words:

Amount, Argument, Art, Be, Beautiful, Belief, Cause, Certain, Chance, Change, Clear, Common, Comparison, Condition, Connection, Copy, Decision, Degree, Desire, Development, Different, Do, Education, End, Event, Examples, Existence, Experience, Fact, Fear, Feeling, Fiction, Force, Form, Free, General, Get, Give, Good, Government, Happy, Have, History, Idea, Important, Interest, Knowledge, Law, Let, Level, Living, Love, Make, Material, Measure, Mind, Motion, Name, Nation, Natural, Necessary, Normal, Number, Observation, Opposite, Order, Organization, Part, Place, Pleasure, Possible, Power, Probable, Property, Purpose, Quality, Question, Reason, Relation, Representative, Respect, Responsible, Right, Same, Say, Science, See, Seem, Sense, Sign, Simple, Society, Sort, Special, Substance, Thing, Thought, True, Use, Way, Wise, Word, Work

All these words carry multiple meanings, and they can say quite different things to different readers. For that reason, Richards' list could just as well have been labeled "The 100 Most Ambiguous Words":

The very usefulness which gives them their importance explains their ambiguity. They are the servants of too many interests to keep to single, clearly defined jobs. Technical words in the sciences are like adzes, planes, gimlets, or razors. A word like "experience," or "feeling," or "true" is like a pocketknife. In good hands it will do most things--not very well. In general we will find that the more important a word is, and the more central and necessary its meanings are in our pictures of ourselves and the world, the more ambiguous and possibly deceiving the word will be.

In an earlier book, The Making of Meaning (1923), Richards (and co-author C. K. Ogden) had explored the fundamental idea that meaning doesn't reside in words themselves. Rather, meaning is rhetorical: it's fashioned out of both a verbal context (the words surrounding the words) and the experiences of the individual reader. No surprise, then, that miscommunication is often the result when the "important words" come into play.

It's this notion of miscommunicating through language that led Richards to conclude that all of us are "learning to read" all the time. "Whenever we use words in forming some judgment or decision, we are, in what may be a painfully sharp sense, 'learning to read'" (How to Read a Page).

* In case anyone's counting, yes, there are actually 103 words on Richards' top-100 list. The bonus words, he said, were meant "to incite the reader to the task of cutting out those he sees no point in and adding any he pleases, and to discourage the notion that there is anything sacrosanct about a hundred, or any other number."

More About Words:

• Six Common Myths About Language
• The 100 Most Frequently Used Words in English
• The Earliest English Dictionaries