Lancaster University

• The way someone talks, and the words they use, tell us quite a bit about where someone is from, their social background and even their age.
• By measuring the frequency of words, we can determine what a particular society or group prioritises and values.
• Here are five frequently discussed topics and some of the words that define them, including how many times they appeared per million words.

1. Time and punctuality

• The idea of time is closely connected with punctuality – something highly valued in Britain.
• The expressions “on time” and “in time” occur with the combined frequency of 47 per million words.
• The most popular month is December (149 per million), followed by March and May (145 and 142 per million respectively).

2. Weather and climate

• Cultural stereotypes – and plenty of polling – suggest that Brits frequently talk about the weather.
• “Weather” is most frequently used in online language (mainly emails and text messages) followed by newspapers (weather reports).
• Climate change (29 per million), emissions (43 per million) and renewable energy (6 per million) also now dominate the public discourse, indicating a growing focus on longer-term changes, not just current weather conditions.

3. Food and drink

• “Dinner” appears 68 times per million words, “lunch” 51 times and “breakfast” 43 times per million.
• The most frequently mentioned food items include eggs, fish, cake, apples, chocolate, cream, chicken, meat, fruit and cheese.
• And a cultural sweet tooth is evident: cake is spoken about three times more frequently than salad.

4. Emotions

• While the British disposition is known to be composed and slightly reserved, the data shows that the most frequent adjective expressing an emotion is “happy”.
• Other adjectives expressing emotions include proud, sad (both 54 per million), pleased (53 per million), afraid (47 per million) and glad (46 per million).

5. Our bodies

• The review of the British National Corpus 2014 also shows that people spend quite a bit of time talking about their bodies.
• Specifically, hand, head, eye, foot and heart are the top five most frequently used words referring to our body.

Vaclav Brezina receives funding from the ESRC, British Council.

• You would be forgiven, then, for thinking nature has perfected the art of turning sunlight into sugar.
• If you struggle with life goals, it might reassure you to know even plants haven’t yet reached their full potential.
• The plants we domesticated for food are only as good at converting sunlight to sugar as they had to be to survive and reproduce.

• A step change in research is shaking up the way scientists think about plants: they are far more complex and more like us than you might imagine.
• Plants such as wheat sometimes mistakenly make a toxic substance called 2-phosphoglycolate which then has to be recycled inside the plant, costing it energy.
• If we could prevent this mistake, it would leave plants more energy for photosynthesis.

Capturing sunlight

• In the same way a coronary bypass diverts blood around narrow or clogged arteries in humans, the photorespiratory bypass gives plants the genetic tools they need to minimise rubisco’s mistake.
• Genes from cyanobacteria make this and other photosynthetic improvements possible because they host an array of enzymes for better sunlight management.

• We’re also improving the speed at which plants respond to changes in light intensity, as this affects photosynthesis too.
• A research group in the US recently showed that speeding up this photoprotection process in soybean can lead to a 33% increase in seed yield.

New tools

• Once we know their function, these genes can be suppressed, promoted or, as has been done in commercial crops since the 1990s, introduced through genetic modification.
• At the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal, Nelson Saibo and Isabel Abreu told us the tools that plant breeders have are more “fine tuners” these days.
• But combining knowledge and new tools will help us get the most out of light.

Jonathan Menary receives funding from the European Union Sebastian Fuller receives funding from the European Commission and the UK National Institute for Health and Care Research Stefan Schillberg receives funding from the European Union

• An online seminar themed "Deepening China-UK Cooperation in the Digital Economy and Promoting Green and Low-Carbon Development" kicked off on December 8, 2023.
• Through keynote speeches, think tank presentations, online discussions, and live interactive sessions, the participants deliberated on the cutting-edge development trends of China-UK cooperation in digital economy, explored the path and direction for green and low-carbon development, and exchanged international advanced development experiences.
• Xue showcased the contributions and achievements of China Unicom in strengthening technological innovation and boosting the green and sustainable development in the telecommunications industry.
• It provided a platform for experts, scholars and practitioners in the fields of digital economy and green and low-carbon development in China and the UK to exchange ideas and cooperate, facilitating broad consensus for deepening cooperation, releasing the lasting impetus for green development, and injecting more momentum into the digital economy and sustainable development of both countries.

• Similarly, associating the word “bad” with success and talking of a “bad success” would be decidedly odd today.
• Corpus linguistics is a branch of linguistics which uses computers to explore the use of words in huge collections of language.
• It can spot nuances that might be overlooked by linguists working manually, or large patterns that a lifetime of studying may not reveal.
• And numbers, counts of words and keeping track of where the words are occurring, are key.

Changing meanings

• People have created Shakespeare dictionaries before, but this is the first to use the full armoury of corpus techniques and the first to be comparative.
• But this is no general term of abuse, let alone banter, as you might see it used today.
• In this way we can see that the meaning of “success” was “outcome” and that outcome, given its collocates, could be good or bad.

Highly frequent words

• Highly frequent words, so often excluded by historical dictionaries and reference works, are often short words that seem insignificant.
• It turns out that a frequent sense of the humble preposition “by” is religious: to reinforce the sincerity of a statement by invoking the divine (for example, “by God”).
• Frequent words such as “alas” or “ah” are revealed to be heavily used by Shakespeare’s female characters, showing that they do the emotional work of lamentation in the plays, especially his histories.

Infrequent words

• What of the infrequent?
• Words that occur only once in Shakespeare – so-called hapax legomena – are nuggets of interest.
• The single case of “bone-ache” in Troilus and Cressida evokes the horrifying torture that syphilis, which it applies to, would have been.
• Another group of interesting infrequent words concerns words that seem to have their earliest occurrence in Shakespeare.