Most Frequent Words

Every language contain lots and lots of words. For instance, according to Oxford English Dictionary, English language contains více more than 600 thousands words. Of course you needn't know every single one. Nobody do. For basic understanding you'll need several hudreds, for easy communication you'll need several thousands of them.

Which words are those most important? There is no simple answer. It depends whether you want to speak on holiday or at work, whether you read an economic newspaper or come tabloid. On this page you'll find lists of most frequently used words of different realms in different languages.

Rankings of Words of Different Languages and Domains:

English
- Journalistic British English (articles from www.telegraph.co.uk)
- Journalistic American English (articles from www.cnn.com)
- Literary American English (books from Dale Carnegie)
- Hollywood English (subtitles of 1st to 3rd series of Desperate Housewives)
French
- Journalistic French (articles from www.lefigaro.fr)
Spanish
- Journalistic Spanish (articles from www.elpais.com)

How these ranks emerge ›››

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Origin of these lists is in bundles of texts that I separated to individual words and than I counted that words with a simple program. The program is quite stupid thus it treates varied forms of one word as different words (plurals, tenses, ...).

I advise not to overestimate the ranking because it is really valid only in the one specific domain. In other circumstances, completely other words can be most frequently user. The first reason is that newspapers (where I take most of texts) usualy describe passed events thus they contains much bigger portion of past tenses than in most of speech.