Bulgarian
frequency dictionary
The Bulgarian frequency dictionary ranks the 8,644 most common Bulgarian words and phrases, measured across 472,006,637 tokens of subtitle dialogue from the OpenSubtitles corpus. Learning the top 108 Bulgarian entries covers half of everything said, and the top 4,691 covers 80%. The single most common Bulgarian word is “да” (yes), which accounts for 4.4% of running text on its own. Every entry carries its rank, raw count, Zipf score, and an English translation.
Corpus
These 8,644 entries account for 83.5% of all running Bulgarian text in the corpus.
108 of them cover half of it.
Bulgarian at a glance
The short answers, straight from the corpus.
- Words for half of speech
- 108
- Words for 80%
- 4,691
- Most common word
- да
- Corpus size
- 472,006,637 tokens
Entries needed to cover 50% of everything said in Bulgarian
Entries needed to cover 80% of running Bulgarian text
“yes” — said 20,823,993 times in the Bulgarian corpus
1,324,020 distinct Bulgarian word forms were counted
Mixed rounds
Bulgarian · All three modes, shuffled
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The ten most common Bulgarian entries
Together they cover 21.6% of everything said in the corpus.
- 1 да yes 20.8M×
- 2 е is 13.7M×
- 3 не no 13.1M×
- 4 се is 10.5M×
- 5 и and 8.6M×
- 6 на on 8.5M×
- 7 си is / yes 7.3M×
- 8 ще will 6.9M×
- 9 за for 6.6M×
- 10 ли li 5.9M×
How far each slice of the list gets you
Share of running Bulgarian text covered by everything up to that rank.
The six bands, in Bulgarian
The same bands the game asks you to guess.
| Band | Entries | Phrases | Median Zipf | Text covered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 100 | 100 | 6 | 6.32 | 49.3% |
| 101–500 | 400 | 63 | 5.43 | 14.0% |
| 501–1,000 | 500 | 104 | 5.02 | 5.4% |
| 1,001–2,000 | 1,000 | 193 | 4.70 | 5.3% |
| 2,001–4,000 | 2,000 | 414 | 4.37 | 4.9% |
| 4,001–8,000 | 4,000 | 872 | 4.05 | 4.6% |
Word shape
Character lengths across the Bulgarian top 1,000 — average 5.3.
Characters per word
Phrases that behave like words
1,802 multi-word units earned a rank of their own.
- #28 трябва да must
- #49 няма да won't / will not
- #52 може да can
- #71 мога да I can
- #82 искам да I want to
- #97 мисля че I think that
- #102 не знам I don't know
- #114 може би maybe
What stands out in Bulgarian
Read straight off this language's own numbers.
- Just 108 entries cover half of everything said in the Bulgarian subtitle corpus.
- The ten most common Bulgarian entries alone account for 21.6% of running text.
- 1,802 of the top 8,644 entries are multi-word phrases that behave like single units — the most common is “трябва да”.
- The longest single word inside the Bulgarian top 1,000 is “единственият” (12 characters, rank 793).
- Most of the Bulgarian top 1,000 is short: 5-character words are the single largest group, and the average is 5.3 characters.
- Frequency falls away fast: the whole 4,001–8,000 band together covers only 4.6% of the corpus.
How this Bulgarian ranking was calculated
Built once, offline, and shipped as static data.
The source is the Bulgarian side of OpenSubtitles v2018 via OPUS — 472,006,637 tokens of transcribed speech, which is closer to how people talk than a newspaper or Wikipedia corpus would be.
Words are counted using Bulgarian's own rules rather than by splitting on spaces, so the counts hold up for writing systems that do not put spaces between words. Timings, formatting and speaker names are stripped out first. 1,324,020 distinct words appear in all; the 8,644 most common are kept.
Repeated word sequences that hold together are promoted into the same ranking as single words, which is why 1,802 entries here are phrases. Each entry carries a raw count, a per-million rate, a Zipf score, and the cumulative share of running text it and everything above it cover.
English glosses come from a translation cascade with per-entry provenance, and anything the translators only echoed back is marked unresolved rather than presented as a translation. 5 of the 8,644 Bulgarian entries are still unresolved and are never used as game questions.
Common questions about Bulgarian word frequency
Answered from this language's own corpus.
How many Bulgarian words do you need to know?
Around 108 Bulgarian words and phrases cover half of everything said in ordinary speech, and about 4,691 cover 80%. Coverage climbs steeply at first and then flattens: the whole top 8,644 reaches 83.5%, so the last few thousand entries add far less than the first few hundred.
What are the most common Bulgarian words?
The ten most common Bulgarian entries are да (yes), е (is), не (no), се (is), и (and), на (on), си (is / yes), ще (will), за (for) and ли (li). Together they account for 21.6% of all running Bulgarian text in the corpus.
What is the most common word in Bulgarian?
The most common Bulgarian word is “да”, meaning “yes”. It appears 20,823,993 times across the corpus, which is 4.4% of everything said.
How is this Bulgarian frequency list calculated?
The list is built from the Bulgarian side of the OpenSubtitles corpus — 472,006,637 tokens of transcribed dialogue, which reflects spoken language far more closely than a news or encyclopedia corpus. Text is tokenised with Unicode word boundaries, subtitle timing and formatting are stripped, and the 1,324,020 distinct forms found are ranked by raw count. The top 8,644 are kept, each with a per-million rate, a Zipf score, and its cumulative share of running text.
Does the Bulgarian list include phrases as well as words?
Yes. 1,802 of the 8,644 Bulgarian entries are multi-word phrases that repeat tightly enough to behave like single vocabulary items — the most common is “трябва да” (must), at rank 28. They are ranked alongside single words rather than in a separate list, because knowing them as units is what fluency looks like.
How much Bulgarian do the top 100 words cover?
The 100 most common Bulgarian entries cover 49.3% of running text by themselves. That is why they are worth learning first: no other 100 items in the language come close.
Is the Bulgarian frequency dictionary free to download?
Yes. All 8,639 translated Bulgarian entries can be exported as JSON, CSV, TSV, Markdown, or an Anki deck straight from the dictionary page, with no account and no sign-up. The data is prebuilt and served as static files.
Corpora of a similar size
Languages whose subtitle corpus is closest to Bulgarian's.