The wording below is the introduction to the summary report – the link below provides the pdf of the report:
‘Story analysis and key findings
As part of an ongoing programme of language research, the Children’s Dictionaries and Children’s Language Data team at Oxford University Press (OUP) has analysed children’s creative writing submitted to the BBC 500 WORDS competition in 2025 … over 46,500 stories! The analysis— undertaken by a team of lexicographers and editors—is based on the Oxford Children’s Corpus, the largest database of writing by children and for children in English, with over half a billion words.
Language is constantly changing and evolving, and children continue to use language in inventive, funny, and unusual ways in their writing. The findings in this document reflect the creativity of children today and their imaginative use of words, along with their interests and preoccupations.
A substantial part of our analysis comes from the comparison of children’s writing from the 2025 competition with that from the competition entries in both 2024 and a longer-term, ten-year comparison, from 2015. There are two age categories in the competition: 5–7 year olds and 8–11 year olds. The closing date for submissions was 7th November 2025.
All quotations are from stories submitted to the BBC 500 WORDS story competition in 2025 and are faithful to the original text. Where percentage changes in frequency are reported, this represents relative frequency which takes into account the size of the corpora compared.’
https://fdslive.oup.com/www.oup.com/oxed/children/500-words/500_WORDS_REPORT_2025.pdf