Hindi
frequency dictionary
The Hindi frequency dictionary ranks the 8,934 most common Hindi words and phrases, measured across 787,135 tokens of subtitle dialogue from the OpenSubtitles corpus. Learning the top 97 Hindi entries covers half of everything said, and the top 1,894 covers 80%. The single most common Hindi word is “है” (is / Yes), which accounts for 5.2% of running text on its own. Every entry carries its rank, raw count, Zipf score, and an English translation.
Corpus
These 8,934 entries account for 89.4% of all running Hindi text in the corpus.
97 of them cover half of it.
Hindi at a glance
The short answers, straight from the corpus.
- Words for half of speech
- 97
- Words for 80%
- 1,894
- Most common word
- है
- Corpus size
- 787,135 tokens
Entries needed to cover 50% of everything said in Hindi
Entries needed to cover 80% of running Hindi text
“is / Yes” — said 41,001 times in the Hindi corpus
28,336 distinct Hindi word forms were counted
Mixed rounds
Hindi · All three modes, shuffled
Loading Hindi…
The ten most common Hindi entries
Together they cover 19.7% of everything said in the corpus.
- 1 है is / Yes 41K×
- 2 मैं I 18.1K×
- 3 नहीं not / No 16.9K×
- 4 हैं are / Yes 13.6K×
- 5 में in 13.2K×
- 6 एक a / One 12.9K×
- 7 आप you 11.4K×
- 8 और and 9.6K×
- 9 यह this 9.5K×
- 10 से from 9.3K×
How far each slice of the list gets you
Share of running Hindi text covered by everything up to that rank.
The six bands, in Hindi
The same bands the game asks you to guess.
| Band | Entries | Phrases | Median Zipf | Text covered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 100 | 100 | 15 | 6.41 | 50.5% |
| 101–500 | 400 | 85 | 5.51 | 18.4% |
| 501–1,000 | 500 | 114 | 5.05 | 6.0% |
| 1,001–2,000 | 1,000 | 220 | 4.73 | 5.6% |
| 2,001–4,000 | 2,000 | 212 | 4.40 | 5.1% |
| 4,001–8,000 | 4,000 | 0 | 3.95 | 3.9% |
Word shape
Character lengths across the Hindi top 1,000 — average 2.4.
Characters per word
Phrases that behave like words
646 multi-word units earned a rank of their own.
- #11 के लिए for
- #30 रहे हैं have been
- #33 है कि that
- #43 ठीक है okay
- #47 रहा है is / has been
- #51 करने के लिए to do
- #53 सकते हैं can
- #56 के साथ with
What stands out in Hindi
Read straight off this language's own numbers.
- Just 97 entries cover half of everything said in the Hindi subtitle corpus.
- The ten most common Hindi entries alone account for 19.7% of running text.
- 646 of the top 8,934 entries are multi-word phrases that behave like single units — the most common is “के लिए”.
- The longest single word inside the Hindi top 1,000 is “yacouba” (7 characters, rank 814).
- Most of the Hindi top 1,000 is short: 2-character words are the single largest group, and the average is 2.4 characters.
- Frequency falls away fast: the whole 4,001–8,000 band together covers only 3.9% of the corpus.
How this Hindi ranking was calculated
Built once, offline, and shipped as static data.
The source is the Hindi side of OpenSubtitles v2018 via OPUS — 787,135 tokens of transcribed speech, which is closer to how people talk than a newspaper or Wikipedia corpus would be.
Words are counted using Hindi'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. 28,336 distinct words appear in all; the 8,934 most common are kept.
Repeated word sequences that hold together are promoted into the same ranking as single words, which is why 646 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. 188 of the 8,934 Hindi entries are still unresolved and are never used as game questions.
Common questions about Hindi word frequency
Answered from this language's own corpus.
How many Hindi words do you need to know?
Around 97 Hindi words and phrases cover half of everything said in ordinary speech, and about 1,894 cover 80%. Coverage climbs steeply at first and then flattens: the whole top 8,934 reaches 89.4%, so the last few thousand entries add far less than the first few hundred.
What are the most common Hindi words?
The ten most common Hindi entries are है (is / Yes), मैं (I), नहीं (not / No), हैं (are / Yes), में (in), एक (a / One), आप (you), और (and), यह (this) and से (from). Together they account for 19.7% of all running Hindi text in the corpus.
What is the most common word in Hindi?
The most common Hindi word is “है”, meaning “is / Yes”. It appears 41,001 times across the corpus, which is 5.2% of everything said.
How is this Hindi frequency list calculated?
The list is built from the Hindi side of the OpenSubtitles corpus — 787,135 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 28,336 distinct forms found are ranked by raw count. The top 8,934 are kept, each with a per-million rate, a Zipf score, and its cumulative share of running text.
Does the Hindi list include phrases as well as words?
Yes. 646 of the 8,934 Hindi entries are multi-word phrases that repeat tightly enough to behave like single vocabulary items — the most common is “के लिए” (for), at rank 11. They are ranked alongside single words rather than in a separate list, because knowing them as units is what fluency looks like.
How much Hindi do the top 100 words cover?
The 100 most common Hindi entries cover 50.5% of running text by themselves. That is why they are worth learning first: no other 100 items in the language come close.
Is the Hindi frequency dictionary free to download?
Yes. All 8,746 translated Hindi 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 Hindi's.