Finding more in 'most': Scientific study of an everyday word

Description

William Shakespeare, who knew a thing or two about words, advised that "An honest tale speeds best, being plainly told." But the exact meaning of plain language isn't always easy to find. Even simple words like "most" and "least" can vary greatly in definition and interpretation, and are difficult to put into precise numbers.

Until now. In a groundbreaking new linguistic study, Prof. Mira Ariel of Tel Aviv University's Department of Linguistics has quantified the meaning of the common word "most." To be published by the renowned Cambridge University Press this year in Defining Pragmatics, this research "is quite shocking for the linguistics world," she says.

When people use the word "most," the study found, they don't usually mean the whole range of 51-99%. The common interpretation is much narrower, understood as a measurement of 80 to 95% of a sample -- whether that sample is of people in a room, cookies in a jar, or witnesses to an accident.

Prof. Ariel cautions that 80-95% is valid today but could shift over the next 100 years, for example.
"That's the nature of language and communication. It changes in the span of a few centuries," Prof. Ariel says, as words evolve over time. "'Most' as a word came to mean 'majority' only recently. Before democracy, we had feudal lords, kings and tribes, and the notion of 'most' referred to who had the lion's share of a given resource ― 40%, 30% or even 20%," she explains.

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