Filipino
frequency dictionary
The Filipino frequency dictionary ranks the 9,287 most common Filipino words and phrases, measured across 103,082 tokens of subtitle dialogue from the OpenSubtitles corpus. Learning the top 84 Filipino entries covers half of everything said, and the top 1,293 covers 80%. The single most common Filipino word is “ang” (the), 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 9,287 entries account for 95.9% of all running Filipino text in the corpus.
84 of them cover half of it.
Filipino at a glance
The short answers, straight from the corpus.
- Words for half of speech
- 84
- Words for 80%
- 1,293
- Most common word
- ang
- Corpus size
- 103,082 tokens
Entries needed to cover 50% of everything said in Filipino
Entries needed to cover 80% of running Filipino text
“the” — said 4,485 times in the Filipino corpus
10,424 distinct Filipino word forms were counted
Mixed rounds
Filipino · All three modes, shuffled
Loading Filipino…
The ten most common Filipino entries
Together they cover 25.0% of everything said in the corpus.
- 1 ang the 4.5K×
- 2 sa to / in 4.4K×
- 3 na that 3.8K×
- 4 ng of 3.2K×
- 5 mo you 2.2K×
- 6 ko my / me 1.9K×
- 7 hindi not / No 1.6K×
- 8 ay is 1.5K×
- 9 mga the / people 1.4K×
- 10 at and 1.4K×
How far each slice of the list gets you
Share of running Filipino text covered by everything up to that rank.
The six bands, in Filipino
The same bands the game asks you to guess.
| Band | Entries | Phrases | Median Zipf | Text covered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 100 | 100 | 3 | 6.40 | 52.1% |
| 101–500 | 400 | 58 | 5.54 | 17.8% |
| 501–1,000 | 500 | 18 | 5.16 | 7.5% |
| 1,001–2,000 | 1,000 | 0 | 4.83 | 6.9% |
| 2,001–4,000 | 2,000 | 0 | 4.46 | 6.2% |
| 4,001–8,000 | 4,000 | 0 | 3.99 | 5.4% |
Word shape
Character lengths across the Filipino top 1,000 — average 5.7.
Characters per word
Phrases that behave like words
79 multi-word units earned a rank of their own.
- #57 sa akin to me
- #74 sa iyo to you
- #93 lahat ng all of / all
- #102 diyos ko my god
- #106 ang lahat all / everyone
- #120 ang aking my / mine
- #143 sa kaniya to him
- #147 ang iyong your
What stands out in Filipino
Read straight off this language's own numbers.
- Just 84 entries cover half of everything said in the Filipino subtitle corpus.
- The ten most common Filipino entries alone account for 25.0% of running text.
- 79 of the top 9,287 entries are multi-word phrases that behave like single units — the most common is “sa akin”.
- The longest single word inside the Filipino top 1,000 is “wherethebearsare.tv” (19 characters, rank 869).
- Most of the Filipino top 1,000 is short: 6-character words are the single largest group, and the average is 5.7 characters.
- Frequency falls away fast: the whole 4,001–8,000 band together covers only 5.4% of the corpus.
How this Filipino ranking was calculated
Built once, offline, and shipped as static data.
The source is the Filipino side of OpenSubtitles v2018 via OPUS — 103,082 tokens of transcribed speech, which is closer to how people talk than a newspaper or Wikipedia corpus would be.
Words are counted using Filipino'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. 10,424 distinct words appear in all; the 9,287 most common are kept.
Repeated word sequences that hold together are promoted into the same ranking as single words, which is why 79 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. 1,114 of the 9,287 Filipino entries are still unresolved and are never used as game questions.
Common questions about Filipino word frequency
Answered from this language's own corpus.
How many Filipino words do you need to know?
Around 84 Filipino words and phrases cover half of everything said in ordinary speech, and about 1,293 cover 80%. Coverage climbs steeply at first and then flattens: the whole top 9,287 reaches 95.9%, so the last few thousand entries add far less than the first few hundred.
What are the most common Filipino words?
The ten most common Filipino entries are ang (the), sa (to / in), na (that), ng (of), mo (you), ko (my / me), hindi (not / No), ay (is), mga (the / people) and at (and). Together they account for 25.0% of all running Filipino text in the corpus.
What is the most common word in Filipino?
The most common Filipino word is “ang”, meaning “the”. It appears 4,485 times across the corpus, which is 4.4% of everything said.
How is this Filipino frequency list calculated?
The list is built from the Filipino side of the OpenSubtitles corpus — 103,082 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 10,424 distinct forms found are ranked by raw count. The top 9,287 are kept, each with a per-million rate, a Zipf score, and its cumulative share of running text.
Does the Filipino list include phrases as well as words?
Yes. 79 of the 9,287 Filipino entries are multi-word phrases that repeat tightly enough to behave like single vocabulary items — the most common is “sa akin” (to me), at rank 57. They are ranked alongside single words rather than in a separate list, because knowing them as units is what fluency looks like.
How much Filipino do the top 100 words cover?
The 100 most common Filipino entries cover 52.1% of running text by themselves. That is why they are worth learning first: no other 100 items in the language come close.
Is the Filipino frequency dictionary free to download?
Yes. All 8,173 translated Filipino 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 Filipino's.