Simplified Chinese
frequency dictionary
The Simplified Chinese frequency dictionary ranks the 9,013 most common Simplified Chinese words and phrases, measured across 16,519,770 tokens of subtitle dialogue from the OpenSubtitles corpus. Learning the top 269 Simplified Chinese entries covers half of everything said, and the top 2,938 covers 80%. The single most common Simplified Chinese word is “我” (I), which accounts for 3.1% of running text on its own. Every entry carries its rank, raw count, Zipf score, and an English translation.
Corpus
These 9,013 entries account for 89.2% of all running Simplified Chinese text in the corpus.
269 of them cover half of it.
Simplified Chinese at a glance
The short answers, straight from the corpus.
- Words for half of speech
- 269
- Words for 80%
- 2,938
- Most common word
- 我
- Corpus size
- 16,519,770 tokens
Entries needed to cover 50% of everything said in Simplified Chinese
Entries needed to cover 80% of running Simplified Chinese text
“I” — said 520,068 times in the Simplified Chinese corpus
115,628 distinct Simplified Chinese word forms were counted
Mixed rounds
Simplified Chinese · All three modes, shuffled
Loading Simplified Chinese…
The ten most common Simplified Chinese entries
Together they cover 16.6% of everything said in the corpus.
- 1 我 I 520.1K×
- 2 的 de / of 504.2K×
- 3 你 you 491.7K×
- 4 了 le / Already 312.4K×
- 5 是 is / Yes 203K×
- 6 我们 we 186.6K×
- 7 他 he 143.9K×
- 8 吗 ma / Is that so? 138.1K×
- 9 这 this 130.1K×
- 10 在 zai / In 116.6K×
How far each slice of the list gets you
Share of running Simplified Chinese text covered by everything up to that rank.
The six bands, in Simplified Chinese
The same bands the game asks you to guess.
| Band | Entries | Phrases | Median Zipf | Text covered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 100 | 100 | 0 | 6.33 | 37.8% |
| 101–500 | 400 | 9 | 5.64 | 20.4% |
| 501–1,000 | 500 | 18 | 5.23 | 9.0% |
| 1,001–2,000 | 1,000 | 71 | 4.90 | 8.5% |
| 2,001–4,000 | 2,000 | 170 | 4.55 | 7.5% |
| 4,001–8,000 | 4,000 | 331 | 4.15 | 6.0% |
Word shape
Character lengths across the Simplified Chinese top 1,000 — average 1.7.
Characters per word
Phrases that behave like words
697 multi-word units earned a rank of their own.
- #204 我 不知道 I don't know
- #252 天 啊 Oh my gosh / Oh my god
- #276 的 时候 when / At that time
- #299 我 觉得 I think
- #310 杀 了 killed
- #326 亲爱 的 dear
- #341 怎么 样 How about / How is it?
- #435 干 嘛 why
What stands out in Simplified Chinese
Read straight off this language's own numbers.
- Just 269 entries cover half of everything said in the Simplified Chinese subtitle corpus.
- The ten most common Simplified Chinese entries alone account for 16.6% of running text.
- 697 of the top 9,013 entries are multi-word phrases that behave like single units — the most common is “我 不知道”.
- The longest single word inside the Simplified Chinese top 1,000 is “you're” (6 characters, rank 509).
- Most of the Simplified Chinese top 1,000 is short: 2-character words are the single largest group, and the average is 1.7 characters.
- Frequency falls away fast: the whole 4,001–8,000 band together covers only 6.0% of the corpus.
How this Simplified Chinese ranking was calculated
Built once, offline, and shipped as static data.
The source is the Simplified Chinese side of OpenSubtitles v2024 via OPUS — 16,519,770 tokens of transcribed speech, which is closer to how people talk than a newspaper or Wikipedia corpus would be.
Words are counted using Simplified Chinese'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. 115,628 distinct words appear in all; the 9,013 most common are kept.
Repeated word sequences that hold together are promoted into the same ranking as single words, which is why 697 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. 297 of the 9,013 Simplified Chinese entries are still unresolved and are never used as game questions.
Common questions about Simplified Chinese word frequency
Answered from this language's own corpus.
How many Simplified Chinese words do you need to know?
Around 269 Simplified Chinese words and phrases cover half of everything said in ordinary speech, and about 2,938 cover 80%. Coverage climbs steeply at first and then flattens: the whole top 9,013 reaches 89.2%, so the last few thousand entries add far less than the first few hundred.
What are the most common Simplified Chinese words?
The ten most common Simplified Chinese entries are 我 (I), 的 (de / of), 你 (you), 了 (le / Already), 是 (is / Yes), 我们 (we), 他 (he), 吗 (ma / Is that so?), 这 (this) and 在 (zai / In). Together they account for 16.6% of all running Simplified Chinese text in the corpus.
What is the most common word in Simplified Chinese?
The most common Simplified Chinese word is “我”, meaning “I”. It appears 520,068 times across the corpus, which is 3.1% of everything said.
How is this Simplified Chinese frequency list calculated?
The list is built from the Simplified Chinese side of the OpenSubtitles corpus — 16,519,770 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 115,628 distinct forms found are ranked by raw count. The top 9,013 are kept, each with a per-million rate, a Zipf score, and its cumulative share of running text.
Does the Simplified Chinese list include phrases as well as words?
Yes. 697 of the 9,013 Simplified Chinese entries are multi-word phrases that repeat tightly enough to behave like single vocabulary items — the most common is “我 不知道” (I don't know), at rank 204. They are ranked alongside single words rather than in a separate list, because knowing them as units is what fluency looks like.
How much Simplified Chinese do the top 100 words cover?
The 100 most common Simplified Chinese entries cover 37.8% of running text by themselves. That is why they are worth learning first: no other 100 items in the language come close.
Is the Simplified Chinese frequency dictionary free to download?
Yes. All 8,716 translated Simplified Chinese 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 Simplified Chinese's.