Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. About 6 percent of everything you say and read and write is the "the" - is the most used word in the English language. About one out of every 16 words we encounter on a daily basis is "the." The top 20 most common English words in order are "the," "of," "and," "to," "a," "in," "is," "I," "that," "it," "for," "you," "was," "with," "on," "as," "have," "but," "be," "they." That's a fun fact. A piece of trivia but it's also more. You see, whether the most commonly used words are ranked across an entire language, or in just one book or article, almost every time a bizarre pattern emerges. The second most used word will appear about half as often as the most used. The third one third as often. The fourth one fourth as often. The fifth one fifth as often. The sixth one sixth as often, and so on all the way down. Seriously.

For some reason, the amount of times a word is used is just proportional to one over its rank. Word frequency and ranking on a log log graph follow a nice straight line. A power-law. This phenomenon is called Zipf's Law and it doesn't only apply to English. It also applies to other languages, like, well, all of them. Even ancient languages we haven't been able to translate yet. And here's the thing. We have no idea why. It's surprising that something as complex as reality should be conveyed by something as creative as language in such a predictable way. How predictable?