How do I find the most common value in more than one column?

Question

When given multiple columns or rows, is there a formula that would return the most common value in the range? Example:

The formula would return Bird in the example above given columns A and B because Bird shows up 4 times, more than any other value.

Answer 1

try:

=INDEX(QUERY({A:A; B:B}, 
 "select Col1,count(Col1) 
  group by Col1 
  order by count(Col1) desc"), 2, 1)