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A few years ago Peter Norvig, the director of research at Google, got a letter from an octogenarian researcher who had painstakingly attempted to examine the English language. The researcher, Mark Mayzner, had culled 20,000 words from newspapers, magazines and books to find the most common words in the English language in 1965. In his letter to Norvig, Mayzner asked if the Google executive might want to look at the same data, except this time with the massive computational power he has access to.

So Norvig did just that. He used Google Books Ngram data to scrape 743,842,922,321 instances of the most common words in English and then began to analyse this information. The results are a clear look at the most popular words in the English language, now beautifully visualized by the Abacaba team, which makes videos about data and math.