Someone turned in a book to the lost and found here which is called "The Word Book" which is, aptly, full of words. It's basically a book on how to spell the most common words in the English language. All 40,000 of them. I imagine the writers of this book just sat down with a dictionary and picked their 40,000 favorite words, because I see no common them throughout the book.

I'm no expert, but I don't believe the following words, included in this book, should be in any compilation of words ever, especially ones that include "most common" in their compilation topic. In fact, I'm not even sure these ARE real words, mainly because I'm too lazy to look them up, and this book offers no definitions. Anyway, here are a few of these words:
amaranth
bitumen
Caledonia (notice the capitalization...)
faience
Gramnegative (and Grampositive)
mestizo
paean
porphyrin
razzle-dazzle (this is really a word?)
suigeneris

I could go on all day listing words that I've never heard of. The point is, how desperate did these people become after, like, word 32,000? Because you're really grasping at straws to call any of the above words common. In fact, since I'm bored, I DID look up one word at random from the list, porphyrin, and got the following definition:
Any of various organic compounds containing four pyrrole rings, occurring universally in protoplasm, and functioning as a metal-binding cofactor in hemoglobin, chlorophyll, and certain enzymes.

So I guess I was wrong. These words are common after all. I just didn't know that all those times I was talking about my metal-binding cofactors, I was really talking of porphyris substances.

To balance it all out, the book does have words like "the" and "a" in it. I guess for those of us who have trouble spelling those words.