Portuguese
frequency dictionary
The Portuguese frequency dictionary ranks the 9,618 most common Portuguese words and phrases, measured across 14,793,501 tokens of subtitle dialogue from the OpenSubtitles corpus. Learning the top 106 Portuguese entries covers half of everything said, and the top 2,312 covers 80%. The single most common Portuguese word is “a” (the), 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 9,618 entries account for 88.0% of all running Portuguese text in the corpus.
106 of them cover half of it.
Portuguese at a glance
The short answers, straight from the corpus.
- Words for half of speech
- 106
- Words for 80%
- 2,312
- Most common word
- a
- Corpus size
- 14,793,501 tokens
Entries needed to cover 50% of everything said in Portuguese
Entries needed to cover 80% of running Portuguese text
“the” — said 497,970 times in the Portuguese corpus
161,347 distinct Portuguese word forms were counted
Mixed rounds
Portuguese · All three modes, shuffled
Loading Portuguese…
The ten most common Portuguese entries
Together they cover 22.1% of everything said in the corpus.
- 1 a the 498K×
- 2 o the 497.1K×
- 3 que that 481.9K×
- 4 não no 415.6K×
- 5 de of / from 347.8K×
- 6 é is 290.4K×
- 7 e and 236.4K×
- 8 um a / one 180.2K×
- 9 para for 168.6K×
- 10 eu I 146.8K×
How far each slice of the list gets you
Share of running Portuguese text covered by everything up to that rank.
The six bands, in Portuguese
The same bands the game asks you to guess.
| Band | Entries | Phrases | Median Zipf | Text covered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 100 | 100 | 3 | 6.40 | 49.2% |
| 101–500 | 400 | 44 | 5.53 | 17.9% |
| 501–1,000 | 500 | 82 | 5.07 | 6.1% |
| 1,001–2,000 | 1,000 | 149 | 4.73 | 5.6% |
| 2,001–4,000 | 2,000 | 304 | 4.37 | 4.9% |
| 4,001–8,000 | 4,000 | 692 | 3.99 | 4.2% |
Word shape
Character lengths across the Portuguese top 1,000 — average 5.3.
Characters per word
Phrases that behave like words
1,549 multi-word units earned a rank of their own.
- #71 o meu my / mine
- #91 a minha my / mine
- #100 por favor please
- #113 acho que I think
- #117 o quê what
- #119 estás a you’re / You are
- #128 o teu your / yours
- #129 não sei I don't know
What stands out in Portuguese
Read straight off this language's own numbers.
- Just 106 entries cover half of everything said in the Portuguese subtitle corpus.
- The ten most common Portuguese entries alone account for 22.1% of running text.
- 1,549 of the top 9,618 entries are multi-word phrases that behave like single units — the most common is “o meu”.
- The longest single word inside the Portuguese top 1,000 is “provavelmente” (13 characters, rank 730).
- Most of the Portuguese top 1,000 is short: 5-character words are the single largest group, and the average is 5.3 characters.
- Frequency falls away fast: the whole 4,001–8,000 band together covers only 4.2% of the corpus.
How this Portuguese ranking was calculated
Built once, offline, and shipped as static data.
The source is the Portuguese side of OpenSubtitles v2024 via OPUS — 14,793,501 tokens of transcribed speech, which is closer to how people talk than a newspaper or Wikipedia corpus would be.
Words are counted using Portuguese'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. 161,347 distinct words appear in all; the 9,618 most common are kept.
Repeated word sequences that hold together are promoted into the same ranking as single words, which is why 1,549 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. 190 of the 9,618 Portuguese entries are still unresolved and are never used as game questions.
Common questions about Portuguese word frequency
Answered from this language's own corpus.
How many Portuguese words do you need to know?
Around 106 Portuguese words and phrases cover half of everything said in ordinary speech, and about 2,312 cover 80%. Coverage climbs steeply at first and then flattens: the whole top 9,618 reaches 88.0%, so the last few thousand entries add far less than the first few hundred.
What are the most common Portuguese words?
The ten most common Portuguese entries are a (the), o (the), que (that), não (no), de (of / from), é (is), e (and), um (a / one), para (for) and eu (I). Together they account for 22.1% of all running Portuguese text in the corpus.
What is the most common word in Portuguese?
The most common Portuguese word is “a”, meaning “the”. It appears 497,970 times across the corpus, which is 3.4% of everything said.
How is this Portuguese frequency list calculated?
The list is built from the Portuguese side of the OpenSubtitles corpus — 14,793,501 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 161,347 distinct forms found are ranked by raw count. The top 9,618 are kept, each with a per-million rate, a Zipf score, and its cumulative share of running text.
Does the Portuguese list include phrases as well as words?
Yes. 1,549 of the 9,618 Portuguese entries are multi-word phrases that repeat tightly enough to behave like single vocabulary items — the most common is “o meu” (my / mine), at rank 71. They are ranked alongside single words rather than in a separate list, because knowing them as units is what fluency looks like.
How much Portuguese do the top 100 words cover?
The 100 most common Portuguese entries cover 49.2% of running text by themselves. That is why they are worth learning first: no other 100 items in the language come close.
Is the Portuguese frequency dictionary free to download?
Yes. All 9,428 translated Portuguese 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 Portuguese's.