Wildly different writing draws on nearly the same words. A picture book, a biotech abstract, the Gettysburg Address — each is mostly a few thousand familiar words, with a thin scatter of rarer ones doing the distinctive work.
Below, you can set the range of word familiarity and see what fits different kinds of writing. The most familiar words are ones like the and and — that’s the top of our ranking. At the lowest end — rare and unfamiliar — are noise, technical terms, and errors. The slider is logarithmic, and you can drag both ends:
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The passages don’t degrade evenly. Around three thousand word-forms, the picture books and the recipes are nearly intact while the biotech abstract is already half ghost. A small core of very common words carries most of any text; the rarer ones are a thin, decisive layer on top. What separates kinds of writing is how hard each leans on that layer.
There are surprises in both directions. A Shakespeare sonnet looks like plain English, yet forms like damask’d, untrimm’d, and wander’st sit past the ranking’s edge — nudge the right bracket inward and they vanish first. A news lede holds up better than its reputation; scholarly prose does not. Hiding the common words inverts the lesson: a children’s book nearly disappears, because almost nothing in it is rare.
Recognizing the words is not the same as understanding the sentence; these percentages count the words you’d know, not the meaning you’d follow.
The same ranking runs through the rest of the site: English has no fixed edge, so we rank words by familiarity instead of counting them. How many words are in English? → · Get the data →
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