For June I am going to write my postings in Common English – an English that uses words that are common to both Shakespeare and our time and to both British and American English, but which follows The Economist when it comes to points of style and usage.

I will write in it for a month, if possible. I may not last the week! But if I do last a month, then I should have enough solid experience to judge whether to continue with it, and maybe some bright ideas about how to make it better.

In view of this I have spent the past few days putting together the list of base words for Common English. It is almost ready.

To do this I needed a list of the five thousand most common words in Shakespeare and the same for American English.

Making the list for Shakespeare was easy: I have his complete works on my computer. I put his works through a program that counts words.

American English was harder. All the best writing in it is under copyright, so it is not in a form that would be easy to put through my word counting program. I did, however, find a list online of the five thousand most common words in the Brown Corpus. The Brown Corpus has a million words of American English and is representative of everything that was printed for the first time in 1961.

Then I went through the list of words from Shakespeare and checked to see if the same word existed in the Brown Corpus – in any form or spelling. If it did, I kept it, otherwise I had to remove it.

In the end only about half of Shakespeare’s words made it. It was hard to see the other half go, all those beautiful words! And what was left seemed the plainer half.

I was afraid that what I had left did not have enough power of expression for a working language. So I added words from Basic English. I added all the ones that could be found in Shakespeare.

Basic English has less than a thousand words – but it does not use the most common words, but the most necessary words. It is designed so that anything that can be said in English can be said in Basic.

Adding these words would fill in any holes left between Shakespeare and Brown. I could be assured that I would have a workable language.

Basic English is a creature of the 20th century just like the Brown Corpus. But it is also British like Shakespeare. That means it will give a slight British cast to the language. But it is either that or end up with an unworkable language.