Friday, August 26, 2011

Most passive verbs in English

According to Michael Rundell and Adam Kilgarriff, there are only 23 verbs in English that are passive more than half the time.

Figure 4: The ‘most passive’ verbs in the BNC, for which a ‘usually passive’ label might be proposed.

Percentile
Ratio
Lemma
Frequency
0.2
72.2
station
0.2
71.8
base
0.3
71.1
destine
0.3
68.7
doom
0.4
66.3
poise
0.4
65.0
situate
0.5
64.7
schedule
0.5
64.1
associate
0.6
63.2
embed
0.7
62.0
entitle
0.8
59.8
couple
0.9
58.1
jail
1.1
57.8
deem
1.1
55.5
confine
1.2
55.4
arm
1.2
54.9
design
1.3
53.9
convict
1.5
53.1
clothe
1.5
52.8
dedicate
1.5
52.4
compose
1.6
51.5
flank
1.7
50.8
gear
1.9
50.1
levy

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