In all films after the silent film era words were spoken. Which word from the English language has been used the most as the first word in a Hollywood film.
First word …
Have i got the straight dope with an unanswerable question. There obviously is a definite answer but unless someone trawls through all the films there is really no way of finding out.:D:D:D:D
My guess is it’s “I”. I don’t have statistics at hand, but I would bet it’s the most frequently used first word in sentences in the English language. And that should also go for first words in films.
**[Moderator Note]
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I have edited the title to better indicate the question. Please don’t post partial questions. Not posting the full question makes it inconvenient for the reader, even if you can see it on mouseover.
Our objective in General Questions is not to ask unaswerable questions, but to find out information that you are genuinely interested in. Don’t do this in General Questions again. You are free to do so in other forums.
In any case, since this is about films it’s better suited to Cafe Society.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
This is going to depend entirely on what kind of language we’re looking at: spoken informal, spoken formal, text from fiction, text from news publications, and so on. The is generally more frequent than I, and since films are stylized, often beginning in the middle of on-going situations, it’s not like the first word of a film is gong to correspond to language in decontextualized sentences.
Anyway, the OP’s question also depends on whether we are considering voice-over narrative or not.
The Natural Language and Dialogue Systems (NLDS) lab at Santa Cruz has a film corpus, but it’s not publicly accessible. If you get access to it, you probably could answer the OP’s questions pretty easily–at least for those films it has in its corpus.
ETA–you can download the data files, but you’re going to have to build your own corpus search. (Have fun.)
I’ll bet cash money the answer to the question posed by the OP is “The”.
It’s hardly a representative sample, but of the 538 films nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, 139 of them (26%) began with the word “The”.
“Howdy!”
I think the OP is talking about the first word in the opening dialog of the film, not the titles of the films.
In any case, yes, as I mentioned above, the is more frequent in English than I, but we’re talking about the first word in dialog, which is always stylized, in one way or another.