A few weeks ago I ran across wordcount.org, a website that lists the 86,800 most frequently used words in English, in order of commonality. And what word do you suppose pops up in spot No. 1? It's "the," the modest, unassuming, but definite article, which begins so many of our utterances.

WordCount's presentation – which the site's proprietors describe as an "artistic experiment" – has an engaging minimalist aesthetic. Enter a word to see where it ranks; enter a rank to see what word holds it.

The site is based on the British National Corpus, which WordCount describes as "a 100 million-word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage." (Note that it's current British English usage, with, naturally, British spellings.)

In any case, "the" stands with its immediate neighbors at the head of the queue, "of," "and," "to," "a," and "in," like the verbal equivalent of the spare change one empties from one's pockets onto the bureau at bedtime. There's not really much to any of them, but how would you put a sentence together without them?

Funny I should ask – even rhetorically – because in fact, "the" seems to be disappearing (inappropriately, to my mind) from a number of places, such as references to institutional names. Take universities, for example. No "the" needed at Harvard, Yale, or Brown – all schools named for a person. Ditto Stanford University – in full, Leland Stanford Junior University, but it's seldom called that. Princeton University and Michigan State University – both of whose names derive from a place – get along fine without an article. But universities "of" somewhere need the "the": the University of Chicago, the University of California. We generally speak of Oxford University, but when we invert the elements to say, "University of Oxford," the "the" is necessary.

The institution in Baltimore named for Mr. Hopkins styles itself officially as "the Johns Hopkins University." Apparently, if you both give the money and name the school after yourself, you get a "the." Yet even Johns Hopkins, on its own homepage, drops its "the," in some places, at least.

Publication titles are places where "the" frequently disappears prematurely. The Los Angeles Times, for instance, does not have a capitalized "the" on its "flag" or "nameplate," unlike, say, The Wall Street Journal. But that doesn't mean that the Times doesn't get a "the" at all. "I read in Los Angeles Times today that..." just isn't on, folks.

The other side of the inappropriately disappearing "the" is the upwardly mobile capitalized "the." This tends to show up especially in the names of businesses where imagination seems in somewhat short supply, e.g., a bookstore on Main Street that calls itself The Bookstore on Main Street, and insists on that capital "T." Or some nouveau hotelier opens something called, obviously but unmemorably, The Inn on the Square. Would-be return visitors may have trouble finding their way back. As this trend continues, I'm ready to hear of some tourist in Manhattan enlisting his bewildered taxi driver's help to locate a hostelry calling itself The Hotel.

There's another disappearing "the" to note: the article in front of country names. Congo, Ivory Coast, Sudan, and Ukraine have all lost their "the" over the past few decades, Ukraine most recently, with the breakup of the Soviet Union. "The" remains in the Netherlands and, in many quarters anyway, in the Gambia, as well as in the names of regions like the Transcaucasus (in Asia) and the Maghreb (northern Africa). The pattern seems to be that a place name evolves from being a descriptor – a common noun, in effect – into a proper noun. Thus the ivory coast became the Ivory Coast and eventually simply Ivory Coast. With independence from the Soviets, "the Ukraine" ("the borderland," literally) has become "Ukraine."

As I write, the world is watching to see whether election results in Ukraine widely regarded as fraudulent are overturned in response to the will of the people flooding the streets by the hundreds of thousands. We shall see whether the Velvet Revolution of Prague and the People Power Revolution in the Philippines will have a sequel in Kiev. The Ukrainians have much at stake as they give up the "definite article" for the "real thing" of independence.

A reader identified only as "Genie," writes,

"Each time I'm confronted with either of the popular phrases, 'gone missing' or 'went missing,' I cringe. If someone isn't here now, although they used to be here, is it not established that they are 'gone'? They obviously 'went' somewhere, if they are not here any longer. As I see it, it is a given that anything 'missing' is most certainly 'gone.' Should these words even be used in tandem?

"To add to my growing irritation, these phrases also make it sound as if 'missing' is an activity, like fishing or shopping, instead of a state of being. So, all I really want to know is: Has 'vanished' vanished?"

No. And disappeared is still there too, along with misplaced, stolen, lost, deserted, and absconded, to list some other synonyms offered by language maven Robert Hartwell Fiske as alternatives to this idiom that has Genie and others popping their corks.

He seems to share her dismay. He writes: "People are so dull-witted and impressionable that, today, in this country [the United States], the popularity of gone or went missing has soared," he writes. (Note the warm, philanthropic tone.) The more appropriate alternatives he suggests "are seldom heard today because went missing has less meaning, or less exact meaning, than any of them, and people, especially the media, perhaps, are afraid of expressing meaning."

Loath though I am to defend vagueness, there is something to be said for using a broader term until you're certain which narrower term applies – until you know whether the no-longer-visible one has gone AWOL, been kidnapped or worse, or perhaps (let's hope) just ambled into town for a cappuccino. As journalism professor Ben Yagoda has pointed out in The Chronicle of Higher Education, both "disappear" and "vanish" suffer from a "presto-chango" connotation. Or as the BBC style-guide, quoted by William Safire, puts it, ‘Disappear’ and ‘vanish’ do not convince, and they suggest dematerialization, which is rare.''

"Gone missing" is one of a silent tide of Anglicisms that have flowed into American conversation over the past dozen years or so. "Run-up" is another one: 20 years ago it was used exclusively by our British stringers; now we can hardly get through an issue without using it. (This past spring, USA Today reported that Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ" was expected to do well "in the run-up to Easter." Silly me, I thought there was already a term for that: Lent.)

This British invasion seems a little counterintuitive: why now? It's not as if the Beatles have just appeared on Ed Sullivan, after all, or the heir to the British throne has just married a fairy-tale princess.

My own theory might be summed up as "Gulf war run-up syndrome": Within the past 15 years, the United States and Britain have fought together in two wars in Iraq. That means lots of British and American reporters rubbing shoulders out on the battlefield and in the briefing rooms. Both wars had precise start dates that followed long lead times – for which, after the fact, "run-up" really does seem the right word. The demands of the 24-hour news cycle and the wonders of satellite phones mean that British and American journalists pop up regularly in one another's pages and broadcasts.

So slowly, slowly, mainstream Americans get used to hearing brisk BBC reporters with names like Nigel and Simon talking about explosives that perhaps went missing during the run-up to the war. (Conversely, are BBC listeners in the Home Counties of England getting used to hearing about a place that seems to be called "Eye Rack"?)

In any case, once I'd read that Bette Midler, lamenting the general decline of civilization, had told CNN talk-show host Larry King, "Shame has gone missing from our lives," I knew the term had crossed over.

A postscript to all this: Anyone who's known English for more than a week is used to the idea that the past tense of "go" is "went." But "went" is borrowed from the quaintly old-fashioned verb "wend" (as in, "He went his way into Stowe-on-the-Wold for cream tea"). This kind of borrowing from unrelated words to form past tenses and comparatives of very commonly used words like "be" and "good" is known as suppletion. It reminds me of a family's everyday dishes, used so much that some get broken and then are replaced with new stuff that doesn't match. The original past tense of "go" has disappeared from the language. We might even say it's gone missing.

They say that generals are always preparing to fight the last war. It's probably also true that every time a people get involved in a war, they talk about it with words left over from the last war – and the war before that, and the war before that.

One leftover from a previous conflict that Donald Rumsfeld made pretty clear early on that he did not want to hear in connection with the war in Iraq was "guerrilla." On June 30, 2003, after the word "quagmire" (see: Vietnam) was spoken aloud by a reporter at a Pentagon press conference, the Defense secretary denied that whatever was developing on the ground in Iraq was a guerrilla war." Said the secretary, "I guess the reason I don't use the phrase 'guerrilla war' is because there isn't one, and it would be a misunderstanding and a miscommunication to you and to the people of the country and the world."

Not everyone was convinced, however. And nearly a year and a half and over a thousand American military fatalities later, there's still something out there. And the military and the media have settled on "insurgency" as the term to describe it. The individual fighters are insurgents, and the reports at this writing are of 2,000 to 3,000 of them in Fallujah, now the focus of the biggest urban assault on a city since the battle for the Vietnamese citadel city of Hue in 1968.

My quick Google News search, at the end of Day 2 of the assault on Fallujah, of the keywords "Iraq insurgents" brought up 27,900 hits. But "guerrillas" the word is proving as persistent in the language as actual guerrillas tend to be in real life. A Google News search for "Iraq guerrillas" brought up 5,590 hits.

A broader search for "guerrillas" brought up 7,620 hits – which was a sobering reminder of just how many guerrillas wars are grinding on around the globe: in Colombia, in Kashmir, Chechnya, and the Philippines, to name just a few.

"Guerrilla" is a relatively neutral term, despite all those posters of a soulful-looking Che Guevara adorning dorm rooms everywhere. "Guerrilla" means "little war" in Spanish, and seems to have first slipped into English to describe the resistance of the Spanish (how apt) against the French during the Napoleonic Wars. Guerrilla tactics, of course, go back much earlier – to the ancient Romans and Alexander the Great. More recently, "guerrilla" has come to refer to the warrior and not the war.

"Rebels" is another relatively neutral term that's been getting a workout lately. My Google News search on "Iraq rebels" yielded 9,760 hits. But it's worth noting that "rebel" has a peculiar usage history in the United States. My recent reading of David Hackett Fischer's "Washington's Crossing" reminded me how often the men we now call our "Founding Fathers" - and after all, there they are on our banknotes and everywhere - were, when they were doing much of the "founding," known as "rebels." Later on the "rebels" were those who sided with the seceding Southern states during the Civil War. The Confederacy lost, but there remains in the American political character an antigovernment, antistate streak of rugged individualism for which the term "rebel" is very apt.

Some terms seem to gain or lose in emotional punch over time. "Militant," for instance, is a multipurpose term being called on to do more heavy lifting nowadays. When I was in school, it was used to describe young black men with Afro haircuts and feminists who wanted to be called "chairperson" when they were put in charge of a committee.

Nowadays the US military often describes Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most wanted man in Iraq, simply as a "Jordanian militant."

"Resistance" is a term that popped up briefly in the Monitor newsroom a few months ago for consideration as a possible designation for the insurgents in Iraq. "Resistance," as the dictionary puts it, is "the organized underground movement in a country fighting against a foreign occupying power, a dictatorship, etc."

We decided it wasn't the right word – associations with the French Resistance during World War II make it too positive a term, we concluded. After all, the Resistance isn't just military history; it's also Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid in "Casablanca."

At some point, somewhere between junior high and last month, I realized that I had two George Romneys floating around in my consciousness. Every once in a while the thought would bubble up: Was the former governor of Michigan related to the English painter of the same name? It's a question that has occurred to me more frequently in the couple of years since Governor George's son Mitt was elected governor of Massachusetts, where I live.

George the painter is well represented at the Huntington Library in southern California, the first serious art gallery I was taken to as a child, and that's probably where I first encountered him. George the governor popped up on my screen a few years after this, when he ran unsuccessfully for president against Richard Nixon in 1968.

Whether there's a family connection has never been anything I needed to know. But that's part of what makes it a quintessential Internet search: It's about the sheer luxury of being able to indulge my curiosity with a few keystrokes. After all, inquiring minds want to know, as the expression goes. And so the other night, when the question came up again, I thought, "Let's Google it."

It turned out, though, that connecting the Romneys was harder than disambiguating them.

When I Googled "George Romney English painter Michigan governor," I was led to a "disambiguation page" at Wikipedia.org.

"To disambiguate" means, in general, to "state unambiguously or to remove the ambiguities from (something)." The point of the Wikipedia page was to separate out Web pages referring to the painterly Romney from those referring to the political Romneys – the assumption being that one would be interested in one or the other, not both.

"Disambiguation" comes into play in distinguishing between, for instance, Turkey the country and turkey the bird, or Mercury the planet and Mercury the Roman god and mercury the metal. It's particularly important for online dictionaries, since computers can't make the distinctions that human being can – without even thinking, one is tempted to say.

I looked at a few of the pages my search turned up, and but ran out of time before I could find anything that settled my question.

But it occurred to me that "disambiguation" is a useful concept for thinking about language and the way it evolves. Often two words that are originally more or less synonyms, or variants of one another, start to separate out and specialize. Take "stanch" and "staunch," for instance. "Stanch" is settling into a full-time job as a verb – as in "to stanch a wound"; "staunch," meanwhile, has come to function largely as an adjective: "He counts on his staunch supporters."

"Convince" and "persuade" are another pair of almost-synonyms that have "disambiguated" themselves: One is convinced of something but persuaded to do something.

Sometimes a specialized new meaning for a word drives an old meaning out. "Virtual" and "virtually," in the computer-age sense, already has begun to crowd the earlier meaning of "in effect" or "for all intents and purposes," as in "He has virtually no options left." Language curmudgeons often grumble about distinctions being lost – between "refute" and "rebut," for instance. But new distinctions are being made every day, it seems.

Meanwhile, what's up with the Romneys? My hunch was right – there is a connection. Sources – in this case, live human beings – at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston confirm that Governor Romney of Michigan was a first cousin five times removed of his namesake the English painter. And Governor Romney of Masschusetts is a first cousin six times removed.

And as for my quintessential Internet moment: well, not quite. Google was as useful as ever in helping me learn something new. But without actual human librarians, connecting the Romneys would have been virtually impossible.