This research aimed to establish a pedagogically useful list of the most frequent opaque idioms in English news. It began by compiling an idiom search list from six prestigious idiom dictionaries. Through a set of criteria, 4,864 semantically non-compositional idioms were culled as search entries to interrogate the News on the Web (NOW) Corpus—the largest news corpus to date. A total of 525 most frequent opaque idioms were ultimately selected. To verify if they merit pedagogical concern, the 525 idioms were tested on the Voice of America (VOA) News Corpus. Results show that they accounted for 0.59% and 0.61% of running words of the NOW and VOA Corpora respectively. Despite a small percentage, knowledge of opaque idioms may contribute to filling the rift of lexical coverage that individual words fail to account for in news articles. For English learners, this opaque idiom list provides a window to the vast number of idioms used in daily news and can serve as a reference in setting lexical goals at the initial phase of idiom learning.
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Wenhua Hsu (2020) studied this question.
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