The Most Common Words in The Harvard Crimson’s Successful Application Essays

Nov 8

The Ivy Institute | College Admissions Research | November 2026

Abstract

Across 88 distinct essays published in nine annual editions, the most frequent words were the (2,579), I (2,221), to (1,670), my (1,588) and and (1,522). Every essay used each of the five. After applying a fixed English stopword list, like led with 128 occurrences, while time appeared in more essays. The top five unfiltered words kept their order whenever one edition was removed. The filtered ranking was more sensitive to the editions included. Word frequency and distribution across essays answer different questions about this collection.

Introduction

An applicant who asks which words appear most often is really asking two questions. Which words occupy the most space on the page? Which ones recur across different essays? Repetition by one writer can answer the first question while having little bearing on the second. This study measures both, retaining common grammatical words so that the first-person point of view remains visible.

Pennebaker and colleagues used function words in application essays to study subsequent academic performance [3]. Their outcome data made that question testable. The Crimson collection supplies published examples and editorial commentary. It can therefore answer a narrower question about the vocabulary of a curated public genre. Alvero and colleagues also showed that essay language varies with household income and test scores in a much larger application dataset [4]. The composition of this published sample matters to any interpretation.

Publication history and study population

The print anthology 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays began in 1999. Subsequent editions appeared in 2005, 2010, 2014, 2017 and 2024. The separately packaged, sponsored online series can be traced through nine consecutive undergraduate editions, from 2018 through 2026. Its 2018 edition is independently identified in the Crimson’s own sponsorship materials [1–2]. The two formats overlap in content. For example, the 2026 journalism essay published under the heading George begins with the same newsroom assignment and opening passage as the sixth-edition publisher excerpt labeled Neb F. Publication year therefore cannot stand in for application year or establish a writer’s identity.

Materials and methods

The study recovered the ten displayed essay bodies from each of nine annual editions. For 2018–2024 it used snapshots of the Crimson page captured in the publication year. The 2025 source was the publisher’s ten-slide feature and the 2026 source its embedded ten-page presentation [2]. Contemporary snapshots matter. The 2018 and 2020 captures retain Marshall and Caden respectively. The September 2022 capture includes Michelle G.’s account of catching butterflies with a grandfather. A later version of the same edition displays Sean’s different butterfly essay, which also appears in the original 2023 edition. The publication-year version defines the 2022 observations here.

The 90 placements yielded 88 distinct texts. On sets of consecutive five-word sequences, the punk-music essays labeled Ariel (2018) and Sophia (2022) had a Jaccard similarity of 0.903. Tony’s 2022 and 2023 essays had a similarity of 1.000. No other pair exceeded 0.02. The earliest appearance of each text was retained. Two 2025 placements both headed Claire describe different experiences and were retained separately. All identifiers in this study denote published texts.

Analysis retained student prose, including dialogue, quoted language and non-English words. The extraction removed page headings, pull quotes displayed a second time, reviews, identified standalone titles and an editorial introduction. A dictionary-style opening that functions as part of the essay was retained. Tokenization normalized Unicode (NFKC), case and curly apostrophes. Runs of letters counted as words. Internal apostrophes stayed within a token, hyphens separated words, and digits were omitted. I’m and I, like learn and learned, are separate forms. These counts can differ from an application platform’s word count.

For each word, the analysis counted occurrences, occurrences per 1,000 tokens and essays containing it. The filtered comparison used scikit-learn’s English stopword list plus a fixed set of common contractions. It preserves words such as like and just. Counts are descriptive for this corpus. Ties are displayed alphabetically.

Table 1. Composition of the vocabulary corpus
Edition	Placements	Distinct texts¹	Word tokens
2018	10	10	6,299
2019	10	10	5,752
2020	10	10	6,287
2021	10	10	6,111
2022	10	9	5,354
2023	10	9	5,780
2024	10	10	6,205
2025	10	10	6,629
2026	10	10	6,492
Total	90	88	54,909

¹ Repeated texts are allocated to their earliest edition. Edition labels refer to publication. The 88 texts ranged from 214 to 914 tokens, with a median of 642.5. They contained 8,700 different word forms.

Results

Figure 1. The ten most frequent word forms

Occurrences in 54,909 words

the2,579

I2,221

to1,670

my1,588

and1,522

of1,469

a1,242

in895

that661

was581

Bars share a zero baseline. Common articles, pronouns, conjunctions and prepositions are included.

The five leading words accounted for 17.45% of all tokens. I and my alone accounted for 6.94%. Each appeared in all 88 essays, including essays organized around another person. This result concerns literal word forms. Counting additional first-person forms or expanding contractions would answer a broader question.

Table 2. Vocabulary after stopword filtering
Word	Uses	Per 1,000	Essays / 88
like	128	2.33	51
time	125	2.28	55
life	105	1.91	54
school	104	1.89	52
world	91	1.66	42
just	90	1.64	52
years	88	1.60	47
day	87	1.58	49
know	87	1.58	46
people	82	1.49	36
new	79	1.44	48
family	77	1.40	32
love	74	1.35	39
did	71	1.29	36
home	69	1.26	37

Discussion

Frequency and reach diverged even near the top. Like appeared three more times than time, yet time occurred in four more essays. Family had 77 occurrences in 32 essays. Home occurred fewer times (69) but in more essays (37). A ranking by total occurrences privileges the words writers return to. Essay coverage counts each text just once.

The contrast is clearest for ye. The tokenizer splits the hyphenated family term Ye-Ye into two tokens. The resulting word form occurred 50 times across only two essays, whereas learned occurred exactly 50 times across 35. The same rank represents two different facts about the corpus. An essay-level count is essential before interpreting an unfamiliar ranked form.

Even common filtered words can perform several jobs. Like may introduce a comparison, report a preference or occur in speech. Time may mark a single occasion, elapsed years or an opportunity. The counting procedure makes no distinction among these uses. Words referring explicitly to familiar application virtues were relatively sparse: leadership occurred six times in five essays and passion 17 times in 14. The count for the literal form Harvard was eight, distributed over two essays. A third used the possessive Harvard’s, a separate token under the stated rule. These are exact-form counts. They say little about how often a writer led a group or cared deeply about an activity.

Sensitivity and limits

Restoring both repeat placements increased the token total to 56,025 and retained the order of the ten leading unfiltered words. In nine leave-one-edition-out analyses, the five most frequent unfiltered forms always kept their order. Among filtered words, time overtook like when 2019, 2020 or 2024 was omitted. A difference of three occurrences is too small to support a durable claim about which of those words characterizes these essays most strongly.

Longer texts contribute more to token totals. The source mixes different prompts, periods and publication formats. A comparison against unpublished admitted essays, unsuccessful essays or ordinary student prose would require additional corpora collected on comparable terms. Within this sample, the most dependable lexical finding is the breadth of first-person reference. The ranking of the remaining vocabulary depends on the question and the filter.

Sources and disclosures

Staff of The Harvard Crimson. 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays. St. Martin’s Griffin. Edition records: 1999, 2005, 2010, 2014, 2017, 2024.
The Crimson Brand Studio and Crimson Business. Undergraduate successful-essay features, edition-specific sources: 2018 · 2019 · 2020 · 2021 · 2022 · 2023 · 2024 · 2025 · 2026. 2026 Crimson host · later 2022 edition page · Crimson sponsorship prospectus.
Pennebaker, J. W., Chung, C. K., Frazee, J., Lavergne, G. M., & Beaver, D. I. (2014). When small words foretell academic success. PLOS ONE, 9, e115844. Publication record.
Alvero, A. J., Giebel, S., Gebre-Medhin, B., Antonio, A. L., Stevens, M. L., & Domingue, B. W. (2021). Essay content and style are strongly related to household income and SAT scores. Science Advances, 7, eabi9031. Publication record.

Study disclosure. Prepared for The Ivy Institute, which contributed professional reviews to the Crimson series, including in 2024 and 2025. Sponsor reviews, applicant profiles and advertising were excluded from the evidence.

Data availability. The accompanying research supplement includes the source register, edition and duplicate identifiers, essay-level codes, full word-frequency table, feature definitions and reproduction scripts. Source links above lead to the original publications or their archived pages. All counts describe the specified editions as reconstructed on November 8, 2026.