The Top 100 Positive Words by Frequency

Here is a list of the top 100 positive words in the English language by frequency.

We have had a lot of positive feedback from our article about Positive words to use in your presentation. One question that we were asked a couple of times is “What are the most commonly used positive words?”

We did some research and could not find an easy answer. So we set off on a task of building a word-counting machine. Well, two months later and working through a few weekends, we have come up with our word-counting machine.

So far, we have counted 12.17 million words in over 10,300 books, articles and news stories – all written in English. We have mainly used the British English spellings, but it should be similar for US or American English.

So here is the list of positive words sorted by frequency.

Rank	Positive Word	Frequency (per Million Words)
1	all	3887
2	one	3290
3	will	3209
4	would	2857
5	more	2495
6	could	1882
7	now	1852
8	very	1640
9	like	1589
10	can	1507
11	first	1348
12	see	1248
13	made	1184
14	know	1177
15	well	1175
16	just	1129
17	much	1064
18	most	1045
19	must	1035
20	new	1030
21	go	997
22	good	984
23	make	925
24	still	890
25	life	884
26	great	875
27	many	860
28	here	802
29	young	702
30	going	653
31	always	586
32	right	575
33	let	573
34	give	556
35	love	548
36	yes	547
37	better	466
38	really	452
39	best	422
40	heart	422
41	family	415
42	enough	397
43	whole	394
44	help	389
45	need	372
46	together	363
47	show	350
48	full	347
49	friend	344
50	believe	333
51	open	333
52	light	317
53	sure	313
54	power	311
55	change	302
56	indeed	298
57	large	296
58	party	292
59	kind	290
60	care	289
61	able	282
62	understand	273
63	idea	266
64	matter	263
65	hope	261
66	possible	254
67	rest	251
68	big	251
69	group	247
70	service	239
71	certain	234
72	soul	228
73	clear	228
74	top	228
75	reason	226
76	nature	224
77	support	223
78	real	220
79	free	218
80	happy	215
81	strong	211
82	answer	202
83	manner	198
84	social	195
85	ready	194
86	hold	190
87	sense	188
88	forward	183
89	pleasure	181
90	team	177
91	truth	175
92	interest	174
93	try	171
94	sound	167
95	sun	166
96	action	166
97	beautiful	163
98	master	160
99	fine	157
100	simply	155

The word-counting engine is very powerful and we are analysing over 1 million words per week. We hope to be able to use it to generate more articles over the coming months.