List of common one-word "sentences"

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I am working on a parser-based conversational game in which the player can enter single-word responses to NPC. These words can be nouns (“marriage”), verbs (“dying”), interjections (“sorry”), etc.

I can add all the words that actually relate to the narrative (and their synonyms), but the player would probably end up entering a lot of other words to explore the system. Thus, I should add at least some boiler-plate output for most common of them, just to make the characters feel a bit more alive.

However, I can’t find any decent resource for a list of words like this. The closest I found was the concept of Sentence words, but could not find any list of most common 1000 or so such words. Also, not all the above examples seem to fall into this category either.

So, I come to you – does any one knows of some list or other resource/tool related to this?

(I understand that this is a pretty vague question, but that is simply because I don’t quite know what I am looking for either.)

Thanks.

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I don’t know anything that meets your specific needs, but the New General Service List is trying to be “the most important words for second language learners of English” and it’s small enough that you could look through and hand-curate a subset if you really had to…

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You could choose a list of the most common words and then filter out the stopwords (e.g. https://www.ranks.nl/stopwords ). That should leave you with the relevant common ones.

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@JoshGrams Oh wow, this is really amazing. Thanks.

@Stian I didn’t know the term “stopword”, this will help a lot. Thank you.

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