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‘At the end of the day,’ the most overused and annoying English phrases

By WTOP Staff

WASHINGTON – Blame society, the media or just the company we keep, but there are plenty of overused phrases in the English language.

And scholars at Oxford University have helped identify the top 10 most overused and useless of them all.

The brains at Oxford monitor current language patterns in the Oxford English Corpus, a database made up of magazines, newspapers, books and Internet publications, the Encyclopedia Britannica’s blog reports. The database holds some 2 billion words, making it the largest linguistic English database.

The overused phrases appear in a book called “Damp Squid,” The Telegraph reports. Check it out below.

Most overused and useless English phrases

  1. At the end of the day
  2. Fairly unique
  3. I, personally
  4. At this moment in time
  5. With all due respect
  6. Absolutely
  7. It’s a nightmare
  8. Shouldn’t of (for shouldn’t have)
  9. 24/7
  10. It’s not rocket science

WTOP’s Megan Cloherty contributed to this report. Follow @WTOP on Twitter.

(Copyright 2013 by WTOP. All Rights Reserved.)

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