From "bae" to "selfie" and even "google," the English language has no shortage of words that are widely used beyond their specific origin stories. Although these words come from "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," the Star Wars universe is one of the most common sources.

A researcher at Chemnitz University of Technology (yes, he's a Star Wars fan too) has for the first time comprehensively quantified the popularity of words and phrases belonging to this sci-fi universe.

Cristina Sanchez-Stockhammer specifically looked at the use of "Jedi", "Apprentice", "Yoda", "lightsaber" (and its variants such as lightsaber and lightsaber) and "dark side" and investigated their frequency in four comprehensive corpora of contemporary English.

She found that just 34% (more than a third) of the citations had nothing to do with George Lucas's sci-fi empire, which shows how deeply entrenched they are in contemporary English.

"I wanted to find out whether vocabulary from the Star Wars universe has become part of our own universe," said Sanchez-Stockhammer, chair of the Department of English and Digital Linguistics. "Star Wars has become an important part of popular culture, and Yoda's role as mentor or the emergence of the lightsaber can be considered familiar to most people, forming the basis for innovative language use."

Many dictionaries already list Star Wars words, and the Oxford English Dictionary contains all Star Wars words analyzed in this study.

"The 'lightsaber' example shows that Star Wars is now even part of our physical reality in some way," Sanchez-Stockhammer said. "Most uses of the word refer to tangible toy lightsabers, as in 'I have my lightsaber and my sci-fi toy.'"

Research also shows that "Jedi" occurs more than four times per million words in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COHA), which contains about a billion words. Therefore, it is as common as "jewel" and "dizziness". Some innovative uses of it include being used as an expert in a certain field, such as "50-year-old Clancy is more than just a financial Jedi."

Although overall, more than one-third of the words examined were "innovative" uses, in 50% of the cases, "Dark Side of the Force" was used without a "Star Wars" inference. We've found that this expression can be used in contexts as diverse as children's behavior, hockey games, politics, and advertising ("cross the dark side when nibbling chocolate").

These innovative uses of the "dark side of the Force" were not common before Star Wars: Rise of an Empire, which began with the first feature film in 1977. Researchers found no evidence of a pre-existing "dark side of the force" in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), which contains 385 million words drawn from 115,000 texts produced between 1920 and 2019.

"Although light and dark have been used as metaphors for good and evil before the Star Wars movies," Sanchez-Stockhammer said, "none of the early sources in the COHA historical corpus adopt a structure in the Star Wars sense—that is, expressing a change in state that is evaluated by the speaker as more immoral."

Innovative usage, such as "a developer crossed over to the dark side and learned about marketing" directly demonstrates the influence of Star Wars on contemporary English.

Sanchez-Stockhammer wrote in the study: "It can be said that these words in the context of usage have reached the highest level of integration into the English language because they are relatively independent of the Star Wars universe (as a common cultural background, the Star Wars universe is taken for granted)."