Most Common English Words

    This free tool lists the most common English words ranked by frequency. Look up any word to see its CEFR level, rank, and neighboring words in the list. This page lists the top 10,000 lemmas — the first 3000 alone cover about 95% of ordinary English texts (Universe of Memory).

    CEFR vocabulary targets

    Word counts per level based on the Rule of 2 (vocabulary needed doubles at each CEFR step):

    LevelWords to knowIn top 10,000
    Elementary (A1)500Yes
    Pre-Intermediate (A2)1,000Yes
    Intermediate (B1)2,000Yes
    Upper-Intermediate (B2)4,000Yes
    Advanced (C1)8,000Yes
    Proficiency (C2)16,000Partially

    Key milestones

    • 1,000 words — about 80% of ordinary texts
    • 3,000 words — about 95% of ordinary texts
    • 5,000 words — about 98% of ordinary texts
    • 10,000 words — about 99% of ordinary texts

    Word list

    Showing 100 of 10,000 words (top 10,000).

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    FAQ

    What are the most common English words?

    This list ranks English lemmas (base word forms) by how often they appear in large text corpora. The top words include "the", "of", "be", and "and". Knowing the first 1000–10000 words covers most everyday English.

    How many words do you need for each CEFR level?

    According to the Rule of 2 described by Bartosz Czekala, vocabulary roughly doubles at each level: about 500 words for A1, 1000 for A2, 2000 for B1, 4000 for B2, 8000 for C1, and 16000 for C2.

    Why is 3000 words an important milestone?

    Research cited by Universe of Memory suggests that knowing about 3000 word families lets you understand roughly 95% of ordinary English texts, though some guessing is still needed for the remaining words.

    What is a lemma?

    A lemma is the dictionary form of a word. For example, "run" is the lemma for "runs", "ran", and "running". This list uses lemmas rather than every inflected form.

    How is CEFR level assigned here?

    We map frequency rank to CEFR bands using the word-count targets from the Rule of 2 article: ranks 1–500 are A1, 501–1000 are A2, 1001–2000 are B1, and so on up to 16000 for C2.

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