Which is the most common chengyu (idiom)?

Question

I was discussing a linguistics paper about chengyu in one of my YouTube videos and wondered what is the most common chengyu. It's the kind of question someone like me would like to know off the top of my head. But I don't know...

I Googled the question in English and Chinese, and found lists of common chengyu, but these are based on people's subjective impressions, and not actual data, and nobody says which is the most common chengyu, just e.g. "here's 100 common chengyu".

The most common character is 的. The most common word is 一 (Junda), 我 (Leeds (internet); LWC), or 在 (BLCU) depending on corpus (I'm not counting 的 nor 了 as words, or 的 would be the most common word).

Question: Which is the most common chengyu (idiom)?

I feel like this is the kind of thing someone should already know. I really can't guess which is the most common chengyu; perhaps it's 不可思议 or 乱七八糟.

Answer 1

Actually, I can work this out myself. It depends on the corpus, and what you consider is or isn't a chengyu. For simplicity, I'll only search for 4-character chengyu. Doing this search, we get a whole bunch of 4-character words like 社会主义 and 工作人员, which I leave off. Below I list the 4-character phrases which I feel could be interpreted as a chengyu (and if you don't think it's a chengyu, just pretend it's not there).

I feel like the correct answer is among: (a) 不好意思, (b) 莫名其妙, (c) 好不容易, (d) 不知不觉, and (e) 有感而发.

Leeds internet corpus

chengyu	no. occurrences per 1mil hanzi
不好意思	36.67
莫名其妙	19.35
好不容易	18.75
不知不觉	18.23
各种各样	17.34
绝大多数	14.65
小心翼翼	14.60
不可思议	14.43
与此同时	13.58
哈哈大笑	11.03

BLCU global corpus

chengyu	count
有感而发	713476
与此同时	621536
不好意思	421657
绝大多数	402207
无论如何	232946
莫名其妙	230452
好不容易	226637
前所未有	224422
不可思议	223894
绝大部分	216299

LWC Weibo corpus

chengyu	no. hits
来之不易	26411
恭喜发财	12648
龙马精神	10904
有感而发	7451
万事如意	6750
一呼百应	6310
欢欢喜喜	5145
战鼓不休	5105
生龙活虎	4980
金枝玉叶	3848

I'm not sure why this is different to the other corpora.