French
frequency dictionary
The French frequency dictionary ranks the 9,725 most common French words and phrases, measured across 14,654,369 tokens of subtitle dialogue from the OpenSubtitles corpus. Learning the top 90 French entries covers half of everything said, and the top 2,261 covers 80%. The single most common French word is “de” (of / from), which accounts for 2.7% of running text on its own. Every entry carries its rank, raw count, Zipf score, and an English translation.
Corpus
These 9,725 entries account for 87.5% of all running French text in the corpus.
90 of them cover half of it.
French at a glance
The short answers, straight from the corpus.
- Words for half of speech
- 90
- Words for 80%
- 2,261
- Most common word
- de
- Corpus size
- 14,654,369 tokens
Entries needed to cover 50% of everything said in French
Entries needed to cover 80% of running French text
“of / from” — said 394,716 times in the French corpus
162,273 distinct French word forms were counted
Mixed rounds
French · All three modes, shuffled
Loading French…
The ten most common French entries
Together they cover 18.1% of everything said in the corpus.
- 1 de of / from 394.7K×
- 2 je I 391.3K×
- 3 le the 275K×
- 4 pas not 270.9K×
- 5 la the 244.7K×
- 6 vous you 242.2K×
- 7 tu you 230.6K×
- 8 que that 209.4K×
- 9 c'est it is / that's it 195.8K×
- 10 à to 193.6K×
How far each slice of the list gets you
Share of running French text covered by everything up to that rank.
The six bands, in French
The same bands the game asks you to guess.
| Band | Entries | Phrases | Median Zipf | Text covered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 100 | 100 | 6 | 6.47 | 51.3% |
| 101–500 | 400 | 82 | 5.51 | 17.0% |
| 501–1,000 | 500 | 95 | 5.04 | 5.8% |
| 1,001–2,000 | 1,000 | 248 | 4.69 | 5.1% |
| 2,001–4,000 | 2,000 | 476 | 4.32 | 4.5% |
| 4,001–8,000 | 4,000 | 1,009 | 3.96 | 3.9% |
Word shape
Character lengths across the French top 1,000 — average 5.3.
Characters per word
Phrases that behave like words
2,377 multi-word units earned a rank of their own.
- #48 je suis I am
- #75 y a there is
- #80 je vais I'm going to / I'm going
- #81 qu'est ce what is / What is it?
- #87 tu as you have
- #91 tu es you are
- #102 je sais I know
- #103 vous avez you have
What stands out in French
Read straight off this language's own numbers.
- Just 90 entries cover half of everything said in the French subtitle corpus.
- The ten most common French entries alone account for 18.1% of running text.
- 2,377 of the top 9,725 entries are multi-word phrases that behave like single units — the most common is “je suis”.
- The longest single word inside the French top 1,000 is “félicitations” (13 characters, rank 984).
- Most of the French 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 3.9% of the corpus.
How this French ranking was calculated
Built once, offline, and shipped as static data.
The source is the French side of OpenSubtitles v2024 via OPUS — 14,654,369 tokens of transcribed speech, which is closer to how people talk than a newspaper or Wikipedia corpus would be.
Words are counted using French'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. 162,273 distinct words appear in all; the 9,725 most common are kept.
Repeated word sequences that hold together are promoted into the same ranking as single words, which is why 2,377 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. 400 of the 9,725 French entries are still unresolved and are never used as game questions.
Common questions about French word frequency
Answered from this language's own corpus.
How many French words do you need to know?
Around 90 French words and phrases cover half of everything said in ordinary speech, and about 2,261 cover 80%. Coverage climbs steeply at first and then flattens: the whole top 9,725 reaches 87.5%, so the last few thousand entries add far less than the first few hundred.
What are the most common French words?
The ten most common French entries are de (of / from), je (I), le (the), pas (not), la (the), vous (you), tu (you), que (that), c'est (it is / that's it) and à (to). Together they account for 18.1% of all running French text in the corpus.
What is the most common word in French?
The most common French word is “de”, meaning “of / from”. It appears 394,716 times across the corpus, which is 2.7% of everything said.
How is this French frequency list calculated?
The list is built from the French side of the OpenSubtitles corpus — 14,654,369 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 162,273 distinct forms found are ranked by raw count. The top 9,725 are kept, each with a per-million rate, a Zipf score, and its cumulative share of running text.
Does the French list include phrases as well as words?
Yes. 2,377 of the 9,725 French entries are multi-word phrases that repeat tightly enough to behave like single vocabulary items — the most common is “je suis” (I am), at rank 48. They are ranked alongside single words rather than in a separate list, because knowing them as units is what fluency looks like.
How much French do the top 100 words cover?
The 100 most common French entries cover 51.3% of running text by themselves. That is why they are worth learning first: no other 100 items in the language come close.
Is the French frequency dictionary free to download?
Yes. All 9,325 translated French 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 French's.