Malay
frequency dictionary
The Malay frequency dictionary ranks the 9,275 most common Malay words and phrases, measured across 17,456,352 tokens of subtitle dialogue from the OpenSubtitles corpus. Learning the top 108 Malay entries covers half of everything said, and the top 1,425 covers 80%. The single most common Malay word is “saya” (I), which accounts for 3.3% of running text on its own. Every entry carries its rank, raw count, Zipf score, and an English translation.
Corpus
These 9,275 entries account for 92.2% of all running Malay text in the corpus.
108 of them cover half of it.
Malay at a glance
The short answers, straight from the corpus.
- Words for half of speech
- 108
- Words for 80%
- 1,425
- Most common word
- saya
- Corpus size
- 17,456,352 tokens
Entries needed to cover 50% of everything said in Malay
Entries needed to cover 80% of running Malay text
“I” — said 582,881 times in the Malay corpus
143,837 distinct Malay word forms were counted
Mixed rounds
Malay · All three modes, shuffled
Loading Malay…
The ten most common Malay entries
Together they cover 17.4% of everything said in the corpus.
- 1 saya I 582.9K×
- 2 yang which / that 391.8K×
- 3 aku I / me 327.4K×
- 4 awak you 275.1K×
- 5 dia he/she 269.3K×
- 6 kau you 250K×
- 7 apa what 247.6K×
- 8 tak not / No 233.2K×
- 9 ini this 231.7K×
- 10 di in 227.6K×
How far each slice of the list gets you
Share of running Malay text covered by everything up to that rank.
The six bands, in Malay
The same bands the game asks you to guess.
| Band | Entries | Phrases | Median Zipf | Text covered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 100 | 100 | 2 | 6.42 | 49.0% |
| 101–500 | 400 | 14 | 5.60 | 20.7% |
| 501–1,000 | 500 | 32 | 5.12 | 7.0% |
| 1,001–2,000 | 1,000 | 37 | 4.77 | 6.2% |
| 2,001–4,000 | 2,000 | 129 | 4.39 | 5.2% |
| 4,001–8,000 | 4,000 | 331 | 3.98 | 4.0% |
Word shape
Character lengths across the Malay top 1,000 — average 5.9.
Characters per word
Phrases that behave like words
661 multi-word units earned a rank of their own.
- #51 di sini here
- #76 terima kasih thank you
- #173 di sana there
- #189 berada di be in
- #284 apa yang berlaku what happened
- #309 minta maaf sorry / Apologize
- #312 maafkan saya forgive me
- #323 tak guna useless
What stands out in Malay
Read straight off this language's own numbers.
- Just 108 entries cover half of everything said in the Malay subtitle corpus.
- The ten most common Malay entries alone account for 17.4% of running text.
- 661 of the top 9,275 entries are multi-word phrases that behave like single units — the most common is “di sini”.
- The longest single word inside the Malay top 1,000 is “menyelamatkan” (13 characters, rank 467).
- Most of the Malay top 1,000 is short: 5-character words are the single largest group, and the average is 5.9 characters.
- Frequency falls away fast: the whole 4,001–8,000 band together covers only 4.0% of the corpus.
How this Malay ranking was calculated
Built once, offline, and shipped as static data.
The source is the Malay side of OpenSubtitles v2018 via OPUS — 17,456,352 tokens of transcribed speech, which is closer to how people talk than a newspaper or Wikipedia corpus would be.
Words are counted using Malay'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. 143,837 distinct words appear in all; the 9,275 most common are kept.
Repeated word sequences that hold together are promoted into the same ranking as single words, which is why 661 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. 668 of the 9,275 Malay entries are still unresolved and are never used as game questions.
Common questions about Malay word frequency
Answered from this language's own corpus.
How many Malay words do you need to know?
Around 108 Malay words and phrases cover half of everything said in ordinary speech, and about 1,425 cover 80%. Coverage climbs steeply at first and then flattens: the whole top 9,275 reaches 92.2%, so the last few thousand entries add far less than the first few hundred.
What are the most common Malay words?
The ten most common Malay entries are saya (I), yang (which / that), aku (I / me), awak (you), dia (he/she), kau (you), apa (what), tak (not / No), ini (this) and di (in). Together they account for 17.4% of all running Malay text in the corpus.
What is the most common word in Malay?
The most common Malay word is “saya”, meaning “I”. It appears 582,881 times across the corpus, which is 3.3% of everything said.
How is this Malay frequency list calculated?
The list is built from the Malay side of the OpenSubtitles corpus — 17,456,352 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 143,837 distinct forms found are ranked by raw count. The top 9,275 are kept, each with a per-million rate, a Zipf score, and its cumulative share of running text.
Does the Malay list include phrases as well as words?
Yes. 661 of the 9,275 Malay entries are multi-word phrases that repeat tightly enough to behave like single vocabulary items — the most common is “di sini” (here), at rank 51. They are ranked alongside single words rather than in a separate list, because knowing them as units is what fluency looks like.
How much Malay do the top 100 words cover?
The 100 most common Malay entries cover 49.0% of running text by themselves. That is why they are worth learning first: no other 100 items in the language come close.
Is the Malay frequency dictionary free to download?
Yes. All 8,607 translated Malay 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 Malay's.