Finnish
frequency dictionary
The Finnish frequency dictionary ranks the 9,260 most common Finnish words and phrases, measured across 10,363,488 tokens of subtitle dialogue from the OpenSubtitles corpus. The single most common Finnish word is “on” (is), which accounts for 3.1% of running text on its own. Every entry carries its rank, raw count, Zipf score, and an English translation.
Corpus
These 9,260 entries account for 76.0% of all running Finnish text in the corpus.
495 of them cover half of it.
Finnish at a glance
The short answers, straight from the corpus.
- Words for half of speech
- 495
- Most common word
- on
- Corpus size
- 10,363,488 tokens
Entries needed to cover 50% of everything said in Finnish
“is” — said 318,514 times in the Finnish corpus
486,378 distinct Finnish word forms were counted
Mixed rounds
Finnish · All three modes, shuffled
Loading Finnish…
The ten most common Finnish entries
Together they cover 12.9% of everything said in the corpus.
- 1 on is 318.5K×
- 2 ei no 178K×
- 3 ja and 154.9K×
- 4 se it 148.7K×
- 5 hän he 123.7K×
- 6 mitä what 108K×
- 7 en I don't 97.7K×
- 8 että that 81K×
- 9 niin so 63.9K×
- 10 olen I am 63.5K×
How far each slice of the list gets you
Share of running Finnish text covered by everything up to that rank.
The six bands, in Finnish
The same bands the game asks you to guess.
| Band | Entries | Phrases | Median Zipf | Text covered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 100 | 100 | 2 | 6.30 | 33.0% |
| 101–500 | 400 | 20 | 5.54 | 17.1% |
| 501–1,000 | 500 | 29 | 5.14 | 7.2% |
| 1,001–2,000 | 1,000 | 71 | 4.80 | 6.7% |
| 2,001–4,000 | 2,000 | 118 | 4.48 | 6.2% |
| 4,001–8,000 | 4,000 | 252 | 4.14 | 5.8% |
Word shape
Character lengths across the Finnish top 1,000 — average 5.7.
Characters per word
Phrases that behave like words
559 multi-word units earned a rank of their own.
- #24 ei ole isn't / not
- #50 tämä on this is
- #103 en tiedä I don't know
- #108 minulla on I have
- #193 olen pahoillani I'm sorry
- #194 meillä on we have
- #207 no niin well then
- #213 sinulla on you have
What stands out in Finnish
Read straight off this language's own numbers.
- Just 495 entries cover half of everything said in the Finnish subtitle corpus.
- The ten most common Finnish entries alone account for 12.9% of running text.
- 559 of the top 9,260 entries are multi-word phrases that behave like single units — the most common is “ei ole”.
- The longest single word inside the Finnish top 1,000 is “toivottavasti” (13 characters, rank 457).
- Most of the Finnish 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 5.8% of the corpus.
How this Finnish ranking was calculated
Built once, offline, and shipped as static data.
The source is the Finnish side of OpenSubtitles v2024 via OPUS — 10,363,488 tokens of transcribed speech, which is closer to how people talk than a newspaper or Wikipedia corpus would be.
Words are counted using Finnish'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. 486,378 distinct words appear in all; the 9,260 most common are kept.
Repeated word sequences that hold together are promoted into the same ranking as single words, which is why 559 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. 66 of the 9,260 Finnish entries are still unresolved and are never used as game questions.
Common questions about Finnish word frequency
Answered from this language's own corpus.
What are the most common Finnish words?
The ten most common Finnish entries are on (is), ei (no), ja (and), se (it), hän (he), mitä (what), en (I don't), että (that), niin (so) and olen (I am). Together they account for 12.9% of all running Finnish text in the corpus.
What is the most common word in Finnish?
The most common Finnish word is “on”, meaning “is”. It appears 318,514 times across the corpus, which is 3.1% of everything said.
How is this Finnish frequency list calculated?
The list is built from the Finnish side of the OpenSubtitles corpus — 10,363,488 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 486,378 distinct forms found are ranked by raw count. The top 9,260 are kept, each with a per-million rate, a Zipf score, and its cumulative share of running text.
Does the Finnish list include phrases as well as words?
Yes. 559 of the 9,260 Finnish entries are multi-word phrases that repeat tightly enough to behave like single vocabulary items — the most common is “ei ole” (isn't / not), at rank 24. They are ranked alongside single words rather than in a separate list, because knowing them as units is what fluency looks like.
How much Finnish do the top 100 words cover?
The 100 most common Finnish entries cover 33.0% of running text by themselves. That is why they are worth learning first: no other 100 items in the language come close.
Is the Finnish frequency dictionary free to download?
Yes. All 9,194 translated Finnish 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 Finnish's.