The Top 10 Words in Commencement Speeches

NPR have a wonderful speech database with over 350 great commencement speeches on their resource The Best Commencement Speeches, Ever

What are the Most Common Words?

Excluding prepositions and other super-common words, the most frequent words appearing in this database of Great Commencement Speeches were:

1. Life
2. Make
3. People
4. World
5. Yourself
6. Make
7. Success
8. Generation
9. Define
10. Human

Source: The Top Words of Wisdom for Graduates on NPR, (accessed 7 May 2019)