Norwegian
frequency dictionary
The Norwegian frequency dictionary ranks the 9,906 most common Norwegian words and phrases, measured across 14,160,836 tokens of subtitle dialogue from the OpenSubtitles corpus. Learning the top 60 Norwegian entries covers half of everything said, and the top 1,445 covers 80%. The single most common Norwegian word is “jeg” (I), which accounts for 3.8% of running text on its own. Every entry carries its rank, raw count, Zipf score, and an English translation.
Corpus
These 9,906 entries account for 89.4% of all running Norwegian text in the corpus.
60 of them cover half of it.
Norwegian at a glance
The short answers, straight from the corpus.
- Words for half of speech
- 60
- Words for 80%
- 1,445
- Most common word
- jeg
- Corpus size
- 14,160,836 tokens
Entries needed to cover 50% of everything said in Norwegian
Entries needed to cover 80% of running Norwegian text
“I” — said 535,008 times in the Norwegian corpus
234,123 distinct Norwegian word forms were counted
Mixed rounds
Norwegian · All three modes, shuffled
Loading Norwegian…
The ten most common Norwegian entries
Together they cover 22.9% of everything said in the corpus.
- 1 jeg I 535K×
- 2 det it / that 508K×
- 3 er is 503.8K×
- 4 du you 428.2K×
- 5 ikke not 303.2K×
- 6 en a / one 209.3K×
- 7 og and 206.6K×
- 8 i in 192.2K×
- 9 vi we 181.2K×
- 10 har has 177.8K×
How far each slice of the list gets you
Share of running Norwegian text covered by everything up to that rank.
The six bands, in Norwegian
The same bands the game asks you to guess.
| Band | Entries | Phrases | Median Zipf | Text covered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 100 | 100 | 2 | 6.45 | 57.0% |
| 101–500 | 400 | 44 | 5.45 | 15.6% |
| 501–1,000 | 500 | 101 | 4.98 | 4.9% |
| 1,001–2,000 | 1,000 | 168 | 4.63 | 4.5% |
| 2,001–4,000 | 2,000 | 311 | 4.27 | 3.9% |
| 4,001–8,000 | 4,000 | 609 | 3.90 | 3.4% |
Word shape
Character lengths across the Norwegian top 1,000 — average 4.9.
Characters per word
Phrases that behave like words
1,522 multi-word units earned a rank of their own.
- #89 jeg vet I know
- #96 kom igjen come on / Come again
- #129 vet ikke I don't know
- #137 jeg tror I think
- #158 la oss Let's
- #182 tror du Do you think
- #187 ikke sant right? / not true
- #205 vær så snill Please
What stands out in Norwegian
Read straight off this language's own numbers.
- Just 60 entries cover half of everything said in the Norwegian subtitle corpus.
- The ten most common Norwegian entries alone account for 22.9% of running text.
- 1,522 of the top 9,906 entries are multi-word phrases that behave like single units — the most common is “jeg vet”.
- The longest single word inside the Norwegian top 1,000 is “selvfølgelig” (12 characters, rank 523).
- Most of the Norwegian top 1,000 is short: 5-character words are the single largest group, and the average is 4.9 characters.
- Frequency falls away fast: the whole 4,001–8,000 band together covers only 3.4% of the corpus.
How this Norwegian ranking was calculated
Built once, offline, and shipped as static data.
The source is the Norwegian side of OpenSubtitles v2024 via OPUS — 14,160,836 tokens of transcribed speech, which is closer to how people talk than a newspaper or Wikipedia corpus would be.
Words are counted using Norwegian'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. 234,123 distinct words appear in all; the 9,906 most common are kept.
Repeated word sequences that hold together are promoted into the same ranking as single words, which is why 1,522 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. 285 of the 9,906 Norwegian entries are still unresolved and are never used as game questions.
Common questions about Norwegian word frequency
Answered from this language's own corpus.
How many Norwegian words do you need to know?
Around 60 Norwegian words and phrases cover half of everything said in ordinary speech, and about 1,445 cover 80%. Coverage climbs steeply at first and then flattens: the whole top 9,906 reaches 89.4%, so the last few thousand entries add far less than the first few hundred.
What are the most common Norwegian words?
The ten most common Norwegian entries are jeg (I), det (it / that), er (is), du (you), ikke (not), en (a / one), og (and), i (in), vi (we) and har (has). Together they account for 22.9% of all running Norwegian text in the corpus.
What is the most common word in Norwegian?
The most common Norwegian word is “jeg”, meaning “I”. It appears 535,008 times across the corpus, which is 3.8% of everything said.
How is this Norwegian frequency list calculated?
The list is built from the Norwegian side of the OpenSubtitles corpus — 14,160,836 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 234,123 distinct forms found are ranked by raw count. The top 9,906 are kept, each with a per-million rate, a Zipf score, and its cumulative share of running text.
Does the Norwegian list include phrases as well as words?
Yes. 1,522 of the 9,906 Norwegian entries are multi-word phrases that repeat tightly enough to behave like single vocabulary items — the most common is “jeg vet” (I know), at rank 89. They are ranked alongside single words rather than in a separate list, because knowing them as units is what fluency looks like.
How much Norwegian do the top 100 words cover?
The 100 most common Norwegian entries cover 57.0% of running text by themselves. That is why they are worth learning first: no other 100 items in the language come close.
Is the Norwegian frequency dictionary free to download?
Yes. All 9,621 translated Norwegian 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 Norwegian's.