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XKCD Author's New Unpublished Book Becomes Scientific Best-Seller

posted by martyb on Sunday August 16 2015, @10:04AM   
from the ten-hundred-words-should-be-enough-for-everyone dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

XKCD cartoonist Randall Munroe will be publishing a new book in November, but it's already become Amazon's #1 best-seller in two "Science & Math" subcategories, for mechanics and scientific instruments. Inspired by a cartoon describing NASA's Saturn V rocket as "the up-goer V", Randall's created a large-format collection of blueprints describing datacenters, tectonic plates, and even the controls in an airplane cockpit — using only the thousand most common English words. "Since this book explains things, I've called it Thing Explainer," Randall writes on the XKCD blog, trying to mimic the humorously simple style of his book. Randall's previous book of scientific hypotheticals [What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions] — published nearly one year ago — is still Amazon's #1 best-selling book in their "Physics" category, ranking higher than Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time."

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Original Submission

• The 'thousand most common English words'? The 'thousand most common English words'? (Score: 3, Insightful) by martyb on Sunday August 16 2015, @05:35PM

  by martyb (76) on Sunday August 16 2015, @05:35PM (#223570) Journal

  From TFS:

  ... using only the thousand most common English words.

  Would anyone here happen to know where I can find this list?

  Background: I have on the order of 20 different word lists I have acquired over the years. I find them to be exceedingly useful when proofreading documents — especially entire books. Depending on the material, it is helpful to have a variety of lists to compare the subject material against. This is certainly one I would love to add to my collection, so any help tracking down the definitive list of 'one thousand most common English words' would be GREATLY appreciated!

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• Not common, but basic (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2015, @03:31AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2015, @03:31AM (#223746)

  Maybe he is using the 1000 for Basic English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:1000_basic_English_words [wiktionary.org] just like in https://xkcd.com/547/ [xkcd.com] and https://xkcd.com/1133/ [xkcd.com] If you want more background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English [wikipedia.org] and https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page [wikipedia.org]

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• Re:The 'thousand most common English words'? (Score: 4, Funny) by deimtee on Monday August 17 2015, @12:05PM

  by deimtee (3272) on Monday August 17 2015, @12:05PM (#223882) Journal

  Apparenly "thousand" doesn't make the list. It should be "the ten hundred most common words in the english language".

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  If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.

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