Wiktionary:Frequency lists

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Counting words and lemmas: The following frequency lists count distinct orthographic words, including inflected and some capitalised forms. For example, the verb "to be" is represented by "is", "are", "were", and so on.

English[edit]

TV and movie scripts[edit]

Most common words in TV and movie scripts: Here are frequency lists comparable to the Gutenberg ones, but based on 29,213,800 words from TV and movie scripts and transcripts.

Here's a fuller explanation of how the list was generated and its limitations: Wiktionary:Frequency lists/TV/2006/explanation.

Here are the top hundred words (from TV scripts) in alphabetical order:

a · about · all · and · are · as · at · back · be · because · been · but · can · can't · come · could · did · didn't · do · don't · for · from · get · go · going · good · got · had · have · he · her · here · he's · hey · him · his · how · I · if · I'll · I'm · in · is · it · it's · just · know · like · look · me · mean · my · no · not · now · of · oh · OK · okay · on · one · or · out · really · right · say · see · she · so · some · something · tell · that · that's · the · then · there · they · think · this · time · to · up · want · was · we · well · were · what · when · who · why · will · with · would · yeah · yes · you · your · you're

Here they are in frequency order:

1-1000 · 1001-2000 · 2001-3000 · 3001-4000 · 4001-5000 · 5001-6000 · 6001-7000 · 7001-8000 · 8001-9000 · 9001-10000
Top 1,000 words cover 85.5% of all words (24,981,922/29,213,800).
Top 10,000 words cover 97.2% of all words (28,398,152/29,213,800).

From the 10,000th to the 40,000th :

10001-12000 · 12001-14000 · 14001-16000 · 16001-18000 · 18001-20000 · 20001-22000 · 22001-24000 · 24001-26000 · 26001-28000 · 28001-30000 · 30001-32000 · 32001-34000 · 34001-36000 · 36001-38000 · 38001-40000
40001-41284 (the dregs that were tied for the final place)

This is a third of all the unique words. The rest were used 5 or fewer times each.

Specific TV series dictionaries[edit]

Project Gutenberg[edit]

Most common words in Project Gutenberg:

These lists are the most frequent words, when performing a simple, straight (obvious) frequency count of all the books found on Project Gutenberg. The list of books was downloaded in July 2005, and "rsynced" monthly thereafter. These are mostly English words, with some other languages finding representation to a lesser extent. Many Project Gutenberg books are scanned once their copyright expires, typically book editions published before 1923, so the language does not necessarily always represent current usage. For example, "thy" is listed as the 280th most common word. Also, with 24,000+ books, the text of the boilerplate warning for Project Gutenberg appears on each of them.

Here are the top 100 words from Project Gutenberg texts in alphabetical order:

These wikified terms can be copied to other language wiktionaries; this is what they are intended for. If you do, please add an interwiki link onto the page here.

Frequency lists as of 2006-04-16:

Frequency lists as of 2005-10-10:

1001-2000 · 2001-3000 · 3001-4000 · 4001-5000 · 5001-6000 · 6001-7000 · 7001-8000 · 8001-9000 · 9001-10000

Frequency lists as of 2005-08-16:

Contemporary fiction[edit]

The 2,000 most common words in contemporary fiction can be found here:

The 2,000 most common words in contemporary fiction can be found here divided into 60 subject categories.

This lumps regular lemmas of the same word together, unlike most of these lists.

Contemporary poetry[edit]

The 2,000 most common words in contemporary poetry can be found here:

Another lemma-based list.

Music[edit]

Top English words lists[edit]

Word families[edit]

Wikipedia[edit]

Adnyamathanha[edit]

Albanian[edit]

Arabic[edit]

Bulgarian[edit]

Catalan[edit]

Croatian[edit]

Czech[edit]

Danish[edit]

Dutch[edit]

Frequent words with example sentences:

The thirteen most popular Dutch words:

From Max Havelaar (numbers between parentheses denote occurrences):

  1. de (4770)
  2. en (2709)
  3. het, 't (2469)
  4. van (2259)
  5. ik (1999)
  6. te (1935)
  7. dat (1875)
  8. die (1807)
  9. in (1639)
  10. een (1637)
  11. hij (1328)
  12. niet (1162)
  13. zijn (1049)

University of Leipzig Frequency Lists:

Frequency of diacritic characters in Dutch:

From diacritical marks in the Dutch language. A list of almost 250,000 Dutch words contained a total of 3538 diacritics:

Character Frequency
ë 1762
ï 599
é 468
è 248
ö 171
ê 71
ü 61
ó 35
ç 30
á 24
à 17
ä 16
û 8
î 7
í 5
ô 4
ú 4
ñ 4
â 3
Å 1

Esperanto[edit]

Frequent words with example sentences:

Estonian[edit]

Finnish[edit]

Frequent words with example sentences:

Comprehensive list of available Finnish online corpora and downloads of corpora:

French[edit]

Frequency lists with English translation:

Sentences sorted by their words frequency:


Frequency lists from http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/html/wliste.html with the authorization from the laboratory. The list was based on Belgium written sources, with a clear financial biais.

Top French words from subtitles based on www.opensubtitles.org


Note: these indicative lists still require some cleanup, because:

  1. they don't unify common words that are normally not capitalized in the dictionary, but can be capitalized at the begining of sentences or in titles;
  2. they do not break correctly words preceded by a separate word contracted with an apostrophe for very common articles (l') or preposition (d') or negation adverb (n') or pronoun (c', j', l', m', s', t'), or verbal liaison particles (-t-, -z-, which are not really words as they don't have any meaning but are written for phonetic reason), or pronoun subjects just after the verb (after a mandatory linking hyphen, that still does not make a compound word but denotes the inversion of the subject rather than the normal occurrence of an object): all these words should be counted separately;
  3. the source is certainly from Belgian French written papers only, with typical occurrences for that country and no equivalence for France, or other French speaking countries where these words are much rarely used (such as currency abbreviations, Belgian toponyms for regions and cities, and many missing terms for very common specialties in France);
  4. the list contains isolated letters that are not words, per se (except a few effective words: a, à, y);
  5. as well, there are acronyms and symbols occurring only in written documents but not as part of the spoken language;
  6. frequent proper names are included but are not very specific to any of the 4 studied languages.

This list does not unify inflected words (with plural or feminine mark on nouns or adjectives, or conjugated verbs), and does not recognize auxiliaries of verbs at compound tenses as part of the conjugated verb, but treat auxiliaries separately for each inflected form. Alphabetising this list can be very helpful for spotting redundancies.

Frequent nouns:

Frequent words with example sentences:

Galician[edit]

Georgian[edit]

German[edit]

Frequency lists with English translation:

Sentences sorted by their words' frequency:

German words in Wikipedia: the 100, 1000, or 10 000 most frequent words 2001.


Top 300,000 German words from the web.



Top 2000 German words from subtitles:

User:Matthias Buchmeier's Unformatted German frequency list. This list has been generated in 2009 from TV and movie subtitles with a total of 25399099 words. This list can be used under the terms of the cc-by-sa, GFDL or LGPL licenses.

Top 10000 German words:

Frequent nouns:

Frequent words with example sentences:

Leeds University German frequency list of 5000 lemmas from internet corpus

Greek[edit]

Hebrew[edit]

Hindi[edit]

Hungarian[edit]

Icelandic[edit]

Icelandic verbs

Indonesian[edit]

Irish[edit]

Italian[edit]

Top 1000 Italian words from subtitles:

Frequent words with example sentences:

Sentences sorted by their words frequency:

Japanese[edit]

Frequent nouns:


National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics word frequency lists


Kanji usage Frequency

Leeds University corpus

Khmer[edit]

The online dictionary http://kheng.info has by far the best frequency list. It also has a box where you can paste items from the list and it hyperlinks the words to immediate recorded pronunciation. Just copy and paste from the "Frequencies" page to the "Read" page. It actually contains pronunciations for almost all of the first 1000, and most of the first 2000. The entire frequency list can be downloaded at the bottom of the "Frequencies page". The anonymous creators of the site have done an enormous job to advance Khmer learning.

Korean[edit]


Frequent nouns:

Latvian[edit]

Lithuanian[edit]

Lü[edit]

Macedonian[edit]

Malay[edit]

Mandarin[edit]

Frequent nouns:

Manx[edit]

Māori[edit]

Marshallese[edit]

Nepali[edit]

Norwegian[edit]

Bokmål and Nynorsk[edit]

Bokmål[edit]

Nynorsk[edit]

Odia[edit]

Palauan[edit]

3,000 most common Palauan words

Persian[edit]

Polish[edit]

Top 200 Polish words:

Frequent words with example sentences:

Sentences sorted by their words frequency:

Portuguese[edit]

European Portuguese[edit]

Unidades e palavras em português europeu: frequência e ordem

Brazilian Portuguese[edit]

Frequent words with example sentences:

Romanian[edit]

Russian[edit]

Frequent nouns:

Frequent words with example sentences:

Sentences sorted by their words frequency:

Sanskrit[edit]

Serbian[edit]

Slovak[edit]

Slovene[edit]

50 most frequent Slovene words, Primož Jakopin research:

je , in , se , v , da , na , so , ne , pa , ki , bi , za , z , ni , sem , ga , še , po , s , tako , ko , tudi , to , bil , ali , si , mu , od , bilo , kot , že , iz , kaj , bo , če , vse , bila , kakor , mi , pri , jo , kar , jih , sta , o , do , ti , kako , samo , me

Spanish[edit]

Royal Spanish Academy (Real Academia Española):

Frequency lists with English translation:

Sentences sorted by their words' frequency:

Top 10000 Spanish words from subtitles:

Frequent nouns:

Frequent words with example sentences:

Swahili[edit]

Swedish[edit]

Frequent words with example sentences:

Sentences sorted by their words frequency:

Tagalog[edit]

Here are the letter frequencies for Tagalog. [1] (Excluding the 2 letters like Ññ and NGng):

Character Frequency
A 24.25% (≈1/4)
N 11.77% (≈105/900)
G 8.51% (≈115/1000)
I 7.89% (≈126/1000)
S 5.6% (≈178/1000)
T 4.87% (≈205/1000)
M 4.27%
O 4.19%
L 3.77%
K 3.61%
Y 3.08%
U 2.98%
P 2.84%
R 2.23%
E 2.22%
H 2.08%
D 2%
B 1.9%
W 0.93%

You may have noticed a better way to remember these in order by thinking of ANGIST-MOLKY-UPREH-D-B-W. Also N and G got quite high due to the fact that the letter NGng adds it up at very high percentages.

Telugu[edit]

A list generated from the most common words in the Telugu Wikipedia in July 2017.

Thai[edit]

Turkish[edit]

Frequent words with example sentences:

Sentences sorted by their words frequency:

Ukrainian[edit]

Frequent words with example sentences:

Uyghur[edit]

Vietnamese[edit]

Welsh[edit]

Yiddish[edit]

See also[edit]

External links[edit]

English[edit]

Russian[edit]

Spanish[edit]

The Word Frequency List of Chilean Spanish (Lifcach) is a set of 102 frequency lists derived from the sub-corpora of the Corpus Dinámico del Castellano de Chile (Dynamic Corpus of Chilean Spanish, Codicach), a corpus of contemporary written Chilean Spanish developed by Sadowsky between 1997 and 2002; this corpus contained approximately 450 million words when the Lifcach was created (it currently contains some 800 million words). The Lifcach also contains a non-weighted list of total frequencies (the Total Occurrences column), which is simply the sum of the frequencies of the 102 individual lists (in other words, the list of frequencies of the entire Codicach corpus.)
English Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia
  1. ^ This is from the website "http://www.sttmedia.com/characterfrequency-filipino"
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