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The answer comes in very shortly. But have a guess, now, before you get to it.
Here’s
some
space
so
you
can
have
that
guess.
On Saturday, I was wondering how much we think about time and what might best evidence this. I looked at poetry: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 19, Emily Dickinson’s A Clock Stopped and others. I took a brief look at paintings on the theme of time, like Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory. There are very many pop songs about time (like these 75). Google Trends told me that interest in time has doubled over the past 15 years. But none of these grabbed me like I was hoping to be grabbed.
Then something did.
Music lyrics got me to words which prompted the thought ‘which is the most frequently used noun in English?’. In turns out that the answer is ‘time’. This fact is somewhat masked by the other forty or so parts of speech (the, and, I, of, etc) that inevitably dominate the top of the raw word lists. But if you filter out these (less interesting) words, you’re left with a list of juicy, discernible, palpable things.
Time has been at the top of this humongous (many tens of thousands of words) tree for a while. In 2006, a study into the count of nouns did the media rounds (eg this BBC piece, the Sydney Morning Herald covered the same story here) and time was top then. Time is still there, according to the authority on the subject (Word Frequency — their website is well worth a visit btw) whose analysis is based on the one-billion-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). This momentous four-letter word occurs just over two thousand times per million words, or one in every 500 words, or once every two pages of a regular book.
Three other explicitly time-related words also make the top 25: year, day and week.
It’s interesting
Some people say ‘so-what?’ when presented with word frequencies. I don’t say that. I find them fascinating. I looked at the list for 20 minutes straight, in awe and wonder, when I first saw it. I also think it tells us something substantive about where our heads are (and where they were — see below).
The data source (COCA) draws from the very many sources in which words are written, including ‘TV and movies, subtitles, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals’. Google Trends data is just search queries which has lots of value but isn’t representative of our general interest — we only search for answers we don’t already know; we only search at moments of peak curiosity. The COCA provides a more balanced and representative snapshot of our collective focus and attention.
They’re all interesting
One could write a book about each word on the list. And in most cases, that’s already been done. Here’s the current top-25:
Time is not the only theme here. Human relationships come through: people, man, woman, child, family, student and group. There are a handful of abstract words — way, thing, life, world, part, point — these six words have become such useful tools for us in making sense of it all. Hand is there, just, as the only body part (though on the full list, head, eye, back, body and face aren’t far behind). Finally, notice that all three types of nouns (remember: common nouns are people, places or things - see image above, via Grammar Monster) are themselves present in the list.
(To the authors and publishers reading this: I would definitely buy a book of 25 chapters, each chapter devoted to one of these nouns.)
How have things changed between 2006 and 2023?
A lot’s happened in the world since 2006. To list some of them, like Billy Joel, we’ve had: the global financial meltdown, smartphones, the Arab Spring, Obama, Trump, Brexit, COVID, BLM, #metoo, general acceptance of the climate crisis, social media, streaming services, the gig economy, an ecommerce explosion, digitalisation of everything - from files to photos to meetings to payments to currency, much broader mental health awareness, renewable energy, refugee crises, AI and Generative AI.
Here are the two lists, alongside each other:
Through those 17 years, time is still #1. And the other time-related words — year, day, week — all feature back then too. Timeless classics.
14 other words have held on to a place in the top-25. ‘Woman’ has gained in popularity. ‘Person’ gives way to ‘people’. There are two new education entries: ‘school’ and ‘student’. And out go a sextet of serious words: ‘fact’, ‘government’, ‘company’, ‘number’, ‘case’, ‘work’.
Why is time so consistently prevalent?
Two things to say here.
The word ‘time’ is extremely versatile. It's a term that bridges the concrete and the abstract. We use it to refer to specific instances (‘What time is it?’), durations (‘This will take some time’), frequencies (‘Many times over’), and abstract concepts (‘The timeless nature of art’) It’s also used in many common phrases: ‘time flies’, ‘time-out’, ‘time zone’, ‘screen time’.
Much of what it is to be human involves time. Ticking seconds fascinate us, as do the centuries, and tracing cosmic events all the way back to the Big Bang. All the events we observe and experiences we go through are rooted in time (or perhaps we root them in time). Memories of the past and hopes for the future fill our hearts. Time is a logistical necessity for interacting with each other — we need to know when. The planning of anything is time-dependent, by definition. We fantasise about time travel. You’re almost at the end of this essay. Five minutes or so have elapsed. There’s no escaping time.
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Time is crucial and central. The most crucial and the most central. The huge amount of data is emphatic on this — the research confirmed my hypothesis. If it’s so important to human beings, should it be more important to you?
Ps: I broke my self-imposed 500-word blog limit for this one because there was so much to say, so much data to discuss and share. Next week, we’ll be back down to the regular, as-advertised word volume.
Even Alan Partridge has got on the time bandwagon with his latest series!
Time affluence already competes for top spot in the list of many people's priorities in life. Alas, time poverty is something all too many of us lament. Good job this newsletter is helping us to focus on how we can make good use of the time we have. Cheers Marc.
I didn't have the time to read this fully and appreciate it. Maybe at some time in the future I can make the time.