The 1000 most common French words

Ranked by how often each word actually occurs, with an English translation. The whole list is below, free, with nothing to sign up for.

Why the first thousand matters

Word frequency falls off a cliff. A small core of words does an enormous share of the work in ordinary speech, and the rest of the vocabulary is a long tail you meet a few times a year. Learning that core first is the highest-leverage thing a beginner can do.

The usual claim is that the top 1000 words cover about 80% of everyday language. That is roughly right for casual spoken text and too generous for anything else: news, fiction and technical writing all lean harder on the tail. Treat this list as the part worth learning deliberately, not as 80% of fluency. Knowing a word here also means recognising its inflections, which the count does not capture.

These rankings come from subtitle corpora, which track conversational usage more closely than book-based lists do.

Other languages

• English
• Spanish
• German
• Italian
• Hebrew

The list