Greek
frequency dictionary
The Greek frequency dictionary ranks the 8,678 most common Greek words and phrases, measured across 13,378,844 tokens of subtitle dialogue from the OpenSubtitles corpus. Learning the top 116 Greek entries covers half of everything said, and the top 4,717 covers 80%. The single most common Greek word is “να” (to), which accounts for 3.4% of running text on its own. Every entry carries its rank, raw count, Zipf score, and an English translation.
Corpus
These 8,678 entries account for 83.3% of all running Greek text in the corpus.
116 of them cover half of it.
Greek at a glance
The short answers, straight from the corpus.
- Words for half of speech
- 116
- Words for 80%
- 4,717
- Most common word
- να
- Corpus size
- 13,378,844 tokens
Entries needed to cover 50% of everything said in Greek
Entries needed to cover 80% of running Greek text
“to” — said 454,114 times in the Greek corpus
274,595 distinct Greek word forms were counted
Mixed rounds
Greek · All three modes, shuffled
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The ten most common Greek entries
Together they cover 18.6% of everything said in the corpus.
- 1 να to 454.1K×
- 2 το the 381.2K×
- 3 δεν not / no 273.5K×
- 4 είναι is 266.9K×
- 5 θα will 250.9K×
- 6 και and 221.9K×
- 7 μου my / me 187.3K×
- 8 με with 156.3K×
- 9 ο the 145.7K×
- 10 για for 144.4K×
How far each slice of the list gets you
Share of running Greek text covered by everything up to that rank.
The six bands, in Greek
The same bands the game asks you to guess.
| Band | Entries | Phrases | Median Zipf | Text covered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 100 | 100 | 3 | 6.39 | 48.4% |
| 101–500 | 400 | 72 | 5.47 | 15.3% |
| 501–1,000 | 500 | 138 | 5.00 | 5.3% |
| 1,001–2,000 | 1,000 | 238 | 4.68 | 5.0% |
| 2,001–4,000 | 2,000 | 471 | 4.37 | 4.9% |
| 4,001–8,000 | 4,000 | 1,004 | 4.03 | 4.4% |
Word shape
Character lengths across the Greek top 1,000 — average 5.4.
Characters per word
Phrases that behave like words
2,097 multi-word units earned a rank of their own.
- #42 πρέπει να must
- #81 μπορώ να I can
- #82 θέλω να I want to
- #110 μπορεί να might / can
- #111 μπορείς να You can
- #146 θεέ μου Oh my God
- #153 γι αυτό that’s why / for that
- #160 ό τι Whatever
What stands out in Greek
Read straight off this language's own numbers.
- Just 116 entries cover half of everything said in the Greek subtitle corpus.
- The ten most common Greek entries alone account for 18.6% of running text.
- 2,097 of the top 8,678 entries are multi-word phrases that behave like single units — the most common is “πρέπει να”.
- The longest single word inside the Greek top 1,000 is “καταλαβαίνεις” (13 characters, rank 444).
- Most of the Greek 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 4.4% of the corpus.
How this Greek ranking was calculated
Built once, offline, and shipped as static data.
The source is the Greek side of OpenSubtitles v2024 via OPUS — 13,378,844 tokens of transcribed speech, which is closer to how people talk than a newspaper or Wikipedia corpus would be.
Words are counted using Greek'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. 274,595 distinct words appear in all; the 8,678 most common are kept.
Repeated word sequences that hold together are promoted into the same ranking as single words, which is why 2,097 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. 25 of the 8,678 Greek entries are still unresolved and are never used as game questions.
Common questions about Greek word frequency
Answered from this language's own corpus.
How many Greek words do you need to know?
Around 116 Greek words and phrases cover half of everything said in ordinary speech, and about 4,717 cover 80%. Coverage climbs steeply at first and then flattens: the whole top 8,678 reaches 83.3%, so the last few thousand entries add far less than the first few hundred.
What are the most common Greek words?
The ten most common Greek entries are να (to), το (the), δεν (not / no), είναι (is), θα (will), και (and), μου (my / me), με (with), ο (the) and για (for). Together they account for 18.6% of all running Greek text in the corpus.
What is the most common word in Greek?
The most common Greek word is “να”, meaning “to”. It appears 454,114 times across the corpus, which is 3.4% of everything said.
How is this Greek frequency list calculated?
The list is built from the Greek side of the OpenSubtitles corpus — 13,378,844 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 274,595 distinct forms found are ranked by raw count. The top 8,678 are kept, each with a per-million rate, a Zipf score, and its cumulative share of running text.
Does the Greek list include phrases as well as words?
Yes. 2,097 of the 8,678 Greek entries are multi-word phrases that repeat tightly enough to behave like single vocabulary items — the most common is “πρέπει να” (must), at rank 42. They are ranked alongside single words rather than in a separate list, because knowing them as units is what fluency looks like.
How much Greek do the top 100 words cover?
The 100 most common Greek entries cover 48.4% of running text by themselves. That is why they are worth learning first: no other 100 items in the language come close.
Is the Greek frequency dictionary free to download?
Yes. All 8,653 translated Greek 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 Greek's.