According to the Guinness Book of World Records, “set” is the English word which has more separate meanings than any other. The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1989, lists 430 ways you can use set. The definitions run to 60,000 words, making short little set the wordlet with the longest dictionary entry of all.

Another small word of massive usage proportions, also used in the paragraph above, is “run”. The Online Etymology Dictionary has 321 entries dedicated to various parts of speech, phrases and idioms containing “run”...