Last week we covered PR man Adam Sherk’s analysis of overused words in press releases. Unsurprisingly, the words ‘leading’ and ‘solution’ were most prominent, showing a lack of originality and how meaningless these types of words are becoming within pitches.

We mentioned that it would be interesting for a UK-based company to run the same research and look at how our local market compares to Sherk’s predominately US-based insight. The founder of Daryl Willcox Publishing (which provides specialist information services for PRs and journalists) got in touch shortly after, as the company has recently done just that.

Rather than pre-empting by analysing the frequency of known buzzwords (as with Sherk’s research), Daryl Willcox looked at all of the words used in press releases distributed through its system within the last sixty days – the biggest dataset the company could run without breaking its software.

This means identifying single words (not phrases) in the body text (excluding headlines) of releases going back two months. That’s 29,517 unique words from 1269 individual press releases.

In the diagram to the left, you’ll see Adam Sherk’s top 20 buzzwords compared to Daryl Willcox’s data, but the order is quite different. Note that the most common buzzword according to Sherk, ‘leading’, was Willcox’s 15th. Yet the 19th most common buzzword according to Sherk’s analysis (the 20th, ‘top’ couldn’t be matched) was way down the listen at 5,427.

Willcox said, “There seem to be many other words that appear more commonly on our press release wire than the suggested ‘buzzwords’, which makes you question just what a buzzword even is?”

Also, when comparing Sherk’s top 20 with that found by Daryl Willcox, the US list seems to be filled largely with adjectives whereas the UK table (see top right) is dominated by nouns. The inclusion of the word ‘online’ could suggest that there a dominance of web-related releases being punted out from the UK – or simply that online products and services are far more likely to use web-base distribution wires. Either way, it’s an interesting highlight of more overused words, this time from a local perspective.

Tags: buzzwords, daryl willcox, jargon, overuse