Danish
frequency dictionary
The Danish frequency dictionary ranks the 9,881 most common Danish words and phrases, measured across 14,593,065 tokens of subtitle dialogue from the OpenSubtitles corpus. Learning the top 54 Danish entries covers half of everything said, and the top 1,330 covers 80%. The single most common Danish word is “er” (is), which accounts for 3.9% of running text on its own. Every entry carries its rank, raw count, Zipf score, and an English translation.
Corpus
These 9,881 entries account for 89.9% of all running Danish text in the corpus.
54 of them cover half of it.
Danish at a glance
The short answers, straight from the corpus.
- Words for half of speech
- 54
- Words for 80%
- 1,330
- Most common word
- er
- Corpus size
- 14,593,065 tokens
Entries needed to cover 50% of everything said in Danish
Entries needed to cover 80% of running Danish text
“is” — said 561,864 times in the Danish corpus
213,547 distinct Danish word forms were counted
Mixed rounds
Danish · All three modes, shuffled
Loading Danish…
The ten most common Danish entries
Together they cover 23.8% of everything said in the corpus.
- 1 er is 561.9K×
- 2 det it / that 546K×
- 3 jeg I 538.3K×
- 4 du you 406.8K×
- 5 ikke not 302.8K×
- 6 i in 244.2K×
- 7 at that 231.4K×
- 8 en a / one 227.8K×
- 9 og and 215.4K×
- 10 har has 195K×
How far each slice of the list gets you
Share of running Danish text covered by everything up to that rank.
The six bands, in Danish
The same bands the game asks you to guess.
| Band | Entries | Phrases | Median Zipf | Text covered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 100 | 100 | 0 | 6.46 | 57.7% |
| 101–500 | 400 | 55 | 5.44 | 15.4% |
| 501–1,000 | 500 | 101 | 4.98 | 5.0% |
| 1,001–2,000 | 1,000 | 178 | 4.64 | 4.6% |
| 2,001–4,000 | 2,000 | 352 | 4.26 | 3.9% |
| 4,001–8,000 | 4,000 | 693 | 3.90 | 3.3% |
Word shape
Character lengths across the Danish top 1,000 — average 4.8.
Characters per word
Phrases that behave like words
1,676 multi-word units earned a rank of their own.
- #127 lad os Let's
- #157 brug for need
- #159 jeg tror I think
- #198 tror du Do you think
- #204 lad mig Let me
- #208 jeg elsker I love
- #215 har brug for needs
- #221 har været has been
What stands out in Danish
Read straight off this language's own numbers.
- Just 54 entries cover half of everything said in the Danish subtitle corpus.
- The ten most common Danish entries alone account for 23.8% of running text.
- 1,676 of the top 9,881 entries are multi-word phrases that behave like single units — the most common is “lad os”.
- The longest single word inside the Danish top 1,000 is “selvfølgelig” (12 characters, rank 218).
- Most of the Danish top 1,000 is short: 5-character words are the single largest group, and the average is 4.8 characters.
- Frequency falls away fast: the whole 4,001–8,000 band together covers only 3.3% of the corpus.
How this Danish ranking was calculated
Built once, offline, and shipped as static data.
The source is the Danish side of OpenSubtitles v2024 via OPUS — 14,593,065 tokens of transcribed speech, which is closer to how people talk than a newspaper or Wikipedia corpus would be.
Words are counted using Danish'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. 213,547 distinct words appear in all; the 9,881 most common are kept.
Repeated word sequences that hold together are promoted into the same ranking as single words, which is why 1,676 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. 296 of the 9,881 Danish entries are still unresolved and are never used as game questions.
Common questions about Danish word frequency
Answered from this language's own corpus.
How many Danish words do you need to know?
Around 54 Danish words and phrases cover half of everything said in ordinary speech, and about 1,330 cover 80%. Coverage climbs steeply at first and then flattens: the whole top 9,881 reaches 89.9%, so the last few thousand entries add far less than the first few hundred.
What are the most common Danish words?
The ten most common Danish entries are er (is), det (it / that), jeg (I), du (you), ikke (not), i (in), at (that), en (a / one), og (and) and har (has). Together they account for 23.8% of all running Danish text in the corpus.
What is the most common word in Danish?
The most common Danish word is “er”, meaning “is”. It appears 561,864 times across the corpus, which is 3.9% of everything said.
How is this Danish frequency list calculated?
The list is built from the Danish side of the OpenSubtitles corpus — 14,593,065 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 213,547 distinct forms found are ranked by raw count. The top 9,881 are kept, each with a per-million rate, a Zipf score, and its cumulative share of running text.
Does the Danish list include phrases as well as words?
Yes. 1,676 of the 9,881 Danish entries are multi-word phrases that repeat tightly enough to behave like single vocabulary items — the most common is “lad os” (Let's), at rank 127. They are ranked alongside single words rather than in a separate list, because knowing them as units is what fluency looks like.
How much Danish do the top 100 words cover?
The 100 most common Danish entries cover 57.7% of running text by themselves. That is why they are worth learning first: no other 100 items in the language come close.
Is the Danish frequency dictionary free to download?
Yes. All 9,585 translated Danish 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 Danish's.