How we choose the phrases: 106 million words of workplace English
Most phrase lists are written from memory. Ours started with data. Here is how a phrase gets into an episode – and what the numbers can and can't tell you.
1. Situations first
We mapped 113 situations people face at work – joining a call late, saying no to extra work, following up on an email, disagreeing in a meeting – in 27 areas, based on the Pearson GSE Professional English and Cambridge Business English frameworks. Every episode covers one situation.
2. Counted in real workplace English
For each situation we collected candidate phrases and counted how often they appear in 106 million words of real workplace language:
- Meetings between non-native speakers (ELITR, VOICE) – 1.4 million words
- Business meetings (AMI, ICSI) – 1.2 million words
- Work emails (Enron) – 36.5 million words
- IT team emails, 2022–2025 (Apache) – 2.7 million words
- Company earnings calls, Q&A and presentations (S&P 500) – 39.3 million words
- Public meetings (MeetingBank) – 17.6 million words
- Talks (TED) – 4.4 million words
- Customer service conversations (ABCD, MultiWOZ) – 3.2 million words
We use only the counts – no texts from these sources appear in the show.
3. Ranked by how likely you are to need them
Each of 6,378 expressions gets a score from 0 to 100: how often it appears (45%), how common its situation is in workplace communication (25%, from 2,600 classified examples) and how widespread the situation is across jobs (30%).
4. Checked by people
From over a thousand candidates, three reviewers – a manager, a B2 learner and a teacher – rated each phrase for usefulness, the gap it fills and how natural it sounds. Each episode then takes four phrases for one situation.
What the numbers can't tell you
We want to be precise about this. For long sentences, the frequency is an estimate. Some phrases were first suggested for a situation and then counted in the data, not discovered there. And how widespread a situation is across jobs is an expert estimate. So we never claim that a phrase is “the most common sentence in English” – only that it was chosen with data, not from a textbook.