C&RL News November 2011  616

Gary Pattillo is reference librarian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, e-mail: pattillo@email.
unc.edu

G a r y  P a t t i l l o

English language facts
The most common nouns in the English language (excluding “function words,” 
such as the, be, to, and, a), are time, person, and year, followed by way and 
day. The 25 most frequent verbs are all one-syllable words, the most frequent 
being be, have, do, say, and get. The five most frequent adjectives are good, new, 
first, last, and long. The top 100 lemmas (the base form of a word) account for 
50 percent of modern English language usage. That is, roughly 50 percent of 
English language usage consists of 100 words.
“The OEC: Facts about the Language,” Oxford University Press, http://oxforddictionaries.com/page/oecfactslanguage 
/the-oec-facts-about-the-language (Retrieved October 10, 2011).

YBP book prices
The average list price of books profiled by YBP Library Services increased by 5.3 
percent over last year. This was the ninth consecutive year of price increases. 
The average list price of an e-book across YBP’s aggregators in FY2011 was 
$97.10, a decrease of 2.9 percent over the previous year. YBP forecasts a 3 to 
4 percent increase in the price of U.S. print books in FY2012.
Nat Bruning, “Annual Book Price Update,” YBP Library Services, www.ybp.com/book_price_update.html (Retrieved 
October 3, 2011).

Open access coalition
The University of Kansas (KU) and 21 other universities and colleges announced 
that they are collaborating to form the Coalition of Open Access Policy Insti-
tutions (COAPI). The new group will “collaborate and share implementation 
strategies, and advocate on a national level,” it said in a statement. “The goal is 
to provide more practical advice and ideas for refining and expanding policies 
on our individual campuses but also to leverage those policies into action,” said 
Lorraine Haricombe, KU dean of libraries. The group’s members so far include 
Arizona State, Columbia, Duke, Emory, Oregon State, Stanford, Harvard, Trinity, 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Oberlin College.
Rebecca Smith, “KU Establishes First Coalition of Institutions Practicing Open Access,” University of Kansas, www.news.
ku.edu/2011/august/3/openaccess.shtml (Retrieved August 19, 2011).

International education indicators
The U.S. average score on the 2009 Program for International Student Assess-
ment (PISA) reading literacy scale was 500, lower than the average scores in 
Canada (524) and Japan (520), not measurably different from those in Germany, 
France, and the United Kingdom; and higher than in Italy (486) and the Russian 
Federation (459). In mathematics, the U.S. average score (487) was lower than 
the average scores in Japan (529), Canada (527), Germany (513), and France 
(497); not measurably different from those in the United Kingdom and Italy; 
and higher than in the Russian Federation (468). In science literacy, the U.S. 
average score was 502, lower than the average scores in Japan (539), Canada 
(529), Germany (520), and the United Kingdom (514); not measurably different 
from the average score in France; and higher than the scores in Italy (489) and 
the Russian Federation (478).
D. C. Miller and L. K. Warren, “Comparative Indicators of Education in the United States and Other G-8 Countries: 2011 
(NCES 2012-007),” U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Washington, D.C.: U.S. 
Government Printing Office, https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2012007 (Retrieved October 12, 2011).