German
frequency dictionary
The German frequency dictionary ranks the 9,914 most common German words and phrases, measured across 14,214,206 tokens of subtitle dialogue from the OpenSubtitles corpus. Learning the top 103 German entries covers half of everything said, and the top 2,035 covers 80%. The single most common German word is “ich” (I), which accounts for 3.6% of running text on its own. Every entry carries its rank, raw count, Zipf score, and an English translation.
Corpus
These 9,914 entries account for 88.4% of all running German text in the corpus.
103 of them cover half of it.
German at a glance
The short answers, straight from the corpus.
- Words for half of speech
- 103
- Words for 80%
- 2,035
- Most common word
- ich
- Corpus size
- 14,214,206 tokens
Entries needed to cover 50% of everything said in German
Entries needed to cover 80% of running German text
“I” — said 510,863 times in the German corpus
232,588 distinct German word forms were counted
Mixed rounds
German · All three modes, shuffled
Loading German…
The ten most common German entries
Together they cover 19.1% of everything said in the corpus.
- 1 ich I 510.9K×
- 2 sie she 320.5K×
- 3 das that 288.3K×
- 4 ist is 279.9K×
- 5 du you 277.2K×
- 6 nicht not 238.1K×
- 7 die the 229.7K×
- 8 und and 203.1K×
- 9 es it 200.7K×
- 10 wir we 167.8K×
How far each slice of the list gets you
Share of running German text covered by everything up to that rank.
The six bands, in German
The same bands the game asks you to guess.
| Band | Entries | Phrases | Median Zipf | Text covered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 100 | 100 | 5 | 6.45 | 49.6% |
| 101–500 | 400 | 47 | 5.56 | 18.7% |
| 501–1,000 | 500 | 76 | 5.07 | 6.2% |
| 1,001–2,000 | 1,000 | 140 | 4.71 | 5.4% |
| 2,001–4,000 | 2,000 | 237 | 4.34 | 4.6% |
| 4,001–8,000 | 4,000 | 523 | 3.96 | 3.9% |
Word shape
Character lengths across the German top 1,000 — average 5.4.
Characters per word
Phrases that behave like words
1,231 multi-word units earned a rank of their own.
- #55 ich bin I am
- #70 ich habe I have
- #94 ich weiß I know
- #96 du bist you are
- #97 hast du do you have
- #106 du hast you have
- #123 ich will I want
- #124 ich hab I have
What stands out in German
Read straight off this language's own numbers.
- Just 103 entries cover half of everything said in the German subtitle corpus.
- The ten most common German entries alone account for 19.1% of running text.
- 1,231 of the top 9,914 entries are multi-word phrases that behave like single units — the most common is “ich bin”.
- The longest single word inside the German top 1,000 is “entschuldigung” (14 characters, rank 524).
- Most of the German top 1,000 is short: 5-character words are the single largest group, and the average is 5.4 characters.
- Frequency falls away fast: the whole 4,001–8,000 band together covers only 3.9% of the corpus.
How this German ranking was calculated
Built once, offline, and shipped as static data.
The source is the German side of OpenSubtitles v2024 via OPUS — 14,214,206 tokens of transcribed speech, which is closer to how people talk than a newspaper or Wikipedia corpus would be.
Words are counted using German'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. 232,588 distinct words appear in all; the 9,914 most common are kept.
Repeated word sequences that hold together are promoted into the same ranking as single words, which is why 1,231 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. 395 of the 9,914 German entries are still unresolved and are never used as game questions.
Common questions about German word frequency
Answered from this language's own corpus.
How many German words do you need to know?
Around 103 German words and phrases cover half of everything said in ordinary speech, and about 2,035 cover 80%. Coverage climbs steeply at first and then flattens: the whole top 9,914 reaches 88.4%, so the last few thousand entries add far less than the first few hundred.
What are the most common German words?
The ten most common German entries are ich (I), sie (she), das (that), ist (is), du (you), nicht (not), die (the), und (and), es (it) and wir (we). Together they account for 19.1% of all running German text in the corpus.
What is the most common word in German?
The most common German word is “ich”, meaning “I”. It appears 510,863 times across the corpus, which is 3.6% of everything said.
How is this German frequency list calculated?
The list is built from the German side of the OpenSubtitles corpus — 14,214,206 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 232,588 distinct forms found are ranked by raw count. The top 9,914 are kept, each with a per-million rate, a Zipf score, and its cumulative share of running text.
Does the German list include phrases as well as words?
Yes. 1,231 of the 9,914 German entries are multi-word phrases that repeat tightly enough to behave like single vocabulary items — the most common is “ich bin” (I am), at rank 55. They are ranked alongside single words rather than in a separate list, because knowing them as units is what fluency looks like.
How much German do the top 100 words cover?
The 100 most common German entries cover 49.6% of running text by themselves. That is why they are worth learning first: no other 100 items in the language come close.
Is the German frequency dictionary free to download?
Yes. All 9,519 translated German 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 German's.