Notice: This data is very jank and unprofessional, and I am in no means an expert in data collection. There are some very clear issues in the way I've collected this data, so everything should be taken with a grain of salt. This data doesn't factor in punctuation. (ergo, night* and night are treated as the same keyword) (This is up to date as of November 3rd, 2026.)
All keywords within the top 100 have at least 100 uses.
you
the
a
if
night
player
each
choose
they
are
die
1
players
learn
evil
to
is
good
demon
or
your
of
character
may
at
their
might
not
day
an
once
game
ability
that
2
townsfolk
dead
minion
per
on
and
outsider
in
all
until
tonight
this
alive
as
executed
start
who
1st
even
drunk
dusk
play
it
knowing
become
characters
dies
be
wins
storyteller
minions
poisoned
when
team
know
3
today
by
for
one
them
alignment
living
have
publicly
with
register
which
only
vote
from
other
time
outsiders
nominate
mad
but
chosen
info
tomorrow
yourself
no
any
live
nominated
execution
guess
first
loses
false
becomes
many
you're
0
don't
"You", the most common word, with 4027 uses, so common that out of 3774 characters, only 1010 don't have it! It has an incredibly commanding lead, with a thousand more uses than "the" (2737), and "a" (2667), and "if" (2460) respectively. "Night", the most common word not to be found within the English Top 100, only has 2357 uses. The highest placing word in the English Top 100 not found in the Homebrew Wiki Top 100 is "I" (3 uses, 10th place in English Top 100).
"Time" is in a tie with "don't", "kill", "must", "nominated", "other", "outsiders", "them", at 6 uses. The most common keywords of the TPI Top 100 not found within the HBWiki Top 100 are... ...sorting via TPI's usage, "execution" (127, 9 TPI), "how" (135, 9 TPI), and "there" (75, 9 TPI) ...sorting via the HBWiki's usage, "abilities" (144, 3 TPI), "kill" (141, 6 TPI), and "how" (135, 9 TPI)
"You're" is the most common keyword on here, with 115 uses. I imagine, because it's a commonly used term in normal English, but is rather improper when referring to Clocktower syntax. (Or just a copout to cut down on character count) "Next" is the first keyword to be entirely unique to homebrew design, and has 110 uses. I think some of my favorite ones in this list are the keywords that are just really funny variations of existing terms that aren't just an example of bad syntax, such as the British spelling of "neighbor" and "traveler". This list is even so sparse that we even have a lot of examples of "wack syntax", with punctuation so niche it's not even defined as punctuation by ASCII. This refers to symbols like "≥" and "–"– I mean who the hell even uses an en dash for crying out loud?? (The answer: christoph-ehm. God bless their German souls.) Punctuation officially recognized by ASCII wasn't counted for this list-- we have a dedicated list for those! "Potion" is the most common script-exclusive keyword, with 43 uses! It's from Festival of Fears, which has a lot of "Potion" characters that get designated as Loric here (probably because it was added before the "Other" character type was a thing) The entire bottom 2 rows (aside from the en dash) are in a 13-way tie, with 12 uses each.
Usually this just means "the starting word", but there are some proper nouns in here, too.
Word
Count
Word
Count
Word
Count
Word
Count
Word
Count
Each
1707
If
1164
You
912
Demon
661
Townsfolk
433
The
407
Minion
382
Once
378
Outsider
366
Storyteller
242
On
230
Minions
227
Outsiders
168
When
144
Players
106
They
90
All
85
Demons
82
Evil
81
A
70
Good
58
Your
52
After
51
X
46
At
43
Grimoire
43
Night
43
Travellers
43
It might also be interesting to see the first two words of the start to an ability, but I don't have the heart in me to finnaggle Google Sheets to be able to do that.
Since "You", the definitively overall highest used keyword ever, is so broad with how many characters use it, characters who don't use it fit into a rather odd niche-- what keywords tend to show up?
A lot of the keywords that are only mentioned once or twice are just mentions of specific characters.
Word
Count
Word
Count
Word
Count
Word
Count
Word
Count
drunk
302
marked
23
vice
15
exiled
10
nobody
10
hand
9
hydra
8
odd
8
prophecy
8
lost
7
queen
7
spartacus
7
beast
6
cabal
6
frodo
6
king
6
lunatic
6
sheep
6
damsel
5
double
5
l
5
lord
5
plague
5
rest
5
samurai
5
unknown
5
The meta here is basically to steal an already existing keyword so you bank off of those sweet sweet mentions. You can see this done with Drunk, Marked, Vice, Exiled, and Nobody. And L, which steals all of the L's. Characters like Hydra are so common mainly because there are already so many "Hydra" characters to begin with, and almost all of them end up being self-referential.
There are a surprising amount of duplicates here! Most of these seem to be very common fantasy or occupational tropes, which makes sense for a lot of the theming many Townsfolk and Outsiders tend to have. The only outlier here is "Hydra", which is a very common Demon name!
These all tend to be the longest words utilized on the wiki, but the Scrabble Score filters out a lot of the keywords that are portmanteaus due to a bad use of punctuation and formatting, or ones that aren't found in common usage, and are much more likely to be character names. A lot of these are unique words, too!
Note: This is a ranking of English words used within Project Gutenberg, so there is a notable level of bias towards academic work and old books.
his
him
we
our
very
little
us
great
Mr
men
shall
came
himself
def
here
went
thought
young
though
god
years
face
house
world
took
love
Mrs
heart
few
far
seemed
looked
de
country
p
home
knew
father
woman
mother
full
almost
thou
water
light
quite
brought
door
morning
myself
Gutenberg
felt
rather
began
money
poor
stood
form
thy
large
kind
often
herself
year
friend
round
wife
passed
feet
son
hundred
thus
hope
dear
thee
high
city
gone
girl
hear
perhaps
sure
indeed
english
body
along
land
air
lay
fire
cried
women
therefore
hour
friends
held
free
war
several
business
I'd say you could totally use this for inspiration on keywords you could introduce to your ability, but I'm not exactly sure how much mileage you'd get out of "girl", "god", and "Gutenberg".
Keywords which are used between 10 ~ 8 times. Not enough to be considered truly unique or niche, but used little enough that, at least on the wiki itself, there doesn't seem to be much of a presence of it.
Keywords used only 3 times. I'd include the keywords used only once or twice, but there are far too many to interestingly include onto an already absurdly long article.
I won't include the list of all of them here, but I'll list out the general categories they tend to appear in:
References to character names, almost all of which are unique
Silly flavor text usage (usually self demonstrating characters, but sometimes just a weird keyword where there shouldn't be one, meow, sing, poop, fiefcommand)
Misspellings of certain words (arbitary, allignement, assasinated, charactors, charater, negitive, dunk)
really Niche mechanics or thing being searched, this tends to be the most interesting one (animals, suit, gender, accountability, roleplayed, interact, dropped, quit, torus, this will often be a script-specific mechanic)
Efforts made to shorten ability text, often using a "+" or a "/" to conjoin two different ideas (townsfolk+outsider, vip+character, you/the, 3rd,…)
Keywords that are just really weird ways to say existing Clocktower terms (resuscitated, rps, declared, ability texts, non-script, unmet, well-functioning, equaldistant, assimilated)
Unique keywords that turn out to be really specific and kind of cumbersome to use (alchemist-constrained, pronouns, queried, besot, pings)
Keywords that are so absurdly nonsensical I genuinely have no idea what they could even be referring to (AND-like, 0submit, predicates, exactions)
Keywords generated by generative AI (transaction, power, opportunities)
Keywords from now-deleted characters (most likely just housekeeping from the wiki's end, though they could also be efforts to rework the ability)