Star Wars words are apparently now ingrained in the English language as well as the Oxford Dictionary, a new study has found.
'Jedi' is used as often as words like 'jewel' and 'dizzy' and in more than a third of uses of Star Wars words there is no direct reference to the film franchise at all.
Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer, a professor in English and Linguistics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, carried out the research.
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A team of linguistic experts investigated how often vocabulary from the series appears in everyday lives and looked at words such as 'Jedi', 'lightsabre', 'Yoda', and 'Padawan'.
Professor Sanchez-Stockhammer, said: "Words from Star Wars have reached the highest level of integration into the English language.
“Star Wars has become such an important part of popular culture that things like Yoda’s role as a mentor or the appearance of lightsabres can be assumed to be familiar to large sections of the population and thus form the basis for innovative language uses.
“The example of ‘lightsabre’ shows that Star Wars is now even somehow part of our physical reality.
"Most uses of the word refer to tangible toy lightsabres, for example, ‘I have my lightsaber and my sci-fi toys’.”
She added that all of the words used in the study already appear in the Oxford English Dictionary.
The word 'jedi' occurs more than four times per million words, meaning it is as common as general vocabulary words like "jewel" or "dizzy".
Phrases such as going to "the dark side" and 'I'm afraid of his sensual powers. Ryan, the man is a sexual Jedi" were also common.
Although other catchphrases such as Dr Spock's "live long and prosper" from Star Trek or Homer Simpson's "D'oh" have entered the language, they are attached to a particular character.
It is rarer for general words to enter the language of their own with no prior knowledge of their origin.
An example is the phrase "mini-me" which originated in the Austin Powers films.
The study also highlights the prevalence of “to the dark side” in the English language, particularly when combined with the verb “cross over”.
Prof Sanchez-Stockhammer explained: “While light and darkness were already used as metaphors for good and evil before the Star Wars films, none of the earlier sources in the corpus of historical American English employs the construction ‘to the dark side’ in the Star Wars sense, e.g., to express a change to a state evaluated as more immoral by the speakers.
"We can therefore conclude from the corpus study that Star Wars has not only had an important and still ongoing impact on popular culture but also on the English language."
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