‘Fundraising’ is 17,557th most frequently used word in English

Howard Lake | 9 September 2004 | News

• Tagged with:
• Giving/Philanthropy
• language

According to Wordcount, the interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words, the word ‘fundraising’ ranks 17,557th.

Oddly enough, “segmentation”, a word that is fundamental to direct marketing fundraising, follows it as the 17,558th most frequently used word.

Indeed, people with too much spare time on their hands have spotted series of words in Wordcount’s list that seem to make sense. Some of the more amusing include “microsoft acquire salary tremendous”, “angel seeks supper”, and “america ensure oil opportunity”.

UK Fundraising’s Howard Lake found, on a mis-spent Friday afternoon, some charity sector examples:

“charity wages drove offence” (words 2657 – 2660);

“exempt telephoned objected” (words 9068 – 9070) which could sum up the spirit of the new corporate telephone preference legislation;

and “judging mason distances charities” (words 7454 – 7457).

The data used comes from the British National Corpus®, “a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources”.

More on charitable definitions

• Chugger included in Oxford dictionary for first time (9 August 2005)
• 10 Latin words that fundraisers user every day (16 September 2014)
• Dictionary.com chooses Eleemosynary as word of the day (17 February 2006)

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.