Mom's the word for young Shropshire storytellers
A national short story competition for young writers attracted more than 1,000 entries from Shropshire, organisers said today – and offered a fascinating glimpse into the way children use language.
BBC Radio 2's 500 Words competition, launched by Breakfast show host Chris Evans, drew 90,000 entries from all over the country.
Youngsters had to tell a story in just 500 words, and the winners will be announced live on air on Friday.
In the meantime lexicographers at the Oxford University Press have been studying the entries – all 40 million words – to produce an insight into the way children use English.
And they found that 'mom' was the word most used in the stories written by 698 Shropshire girls and 374 boys.
They also showed their rural roots by featuring sheep 64 times more in their tales than children in other areas.
Meanwhile, the icy weather that swept the region at the start of the year could have been influenced the popularity of the words 'snow' and 'ski', which both feature in the top 10.
Other well-used words included 'Jade', 'nan', 'kitten', and 'concert'.
But there was bad news for teachers, with the word 'don't' appearing without its apostrophe 49 times more in the Shropshire entries than in those from other regions.
And where 'mom' was the most written word overall, with regional variations including 'mum' and 'mam', dad only just scraped into the top 15.
However, he did star as an action man in several of the top 50 shortlisted stories – fighting aliens, exploding, and building a time machine.
The stories also showed the popularity of dragons, monsters, giants, fairies and wizards.
The word 'magic' appeared nearly 10,000 times.
James Bond also featured 1,000 times, closely followed by boy band One Direction.
Vineeta Gupta, head of children's dictionaries at Oxford University Press said: "Children are true innovators with words and language and have produced such creative and powerful stories.
"It is wonderful to see how children are taking traditional themes, words and stories and transforming them into tales for the 21st century audience.
"We poured the millions of words used by the young writers into our language cauldron and 'magicked' up a whole host of fascinating findings that will shine a light on our children's language research in the future."
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Chris Evans added: "I was staggered to find out we'd received over 90,000 entries for this year's 500 Words competition.
"The creativity of these awesome authors knows no bounds – we have dragons, monsters, wizards, space-ships – and some of these super story-tellers are even inventing new words. Inspirational or what?"
The six winners of this year's 500 Words will be announced live on air on Friday, at the Hay Festival – with each young author hearing their words brought to life by a superstar narrator during a live broadcast of The Chris Evans Breakfast Show.
There are gold, silver and bronze prizes in each age group.
The show will be broadcast on Radio 2 between 6.30am and 9am.
Have your children invented any unusual words? E-mail newsroom@shropshirestar.co.uk
