Tamil
frequency dictionary
The Tamil frequency dictionary ranks the 8,797 most common Tamil words and phrases, measured across 146,443 tokens of subtitle dialogue from the OpenSubtitles corpus. Learning the top 221 Tamil entries covers half of everything said, and the top 2,841 covers 80%. The single most common Tamil word is “நான்” (I), which accounts for 4.0% of running text on its own. Every entry carries its rank, raw count, Zipf score, and an English translation.
Corpus
These 8,797 entries account for 90.1% of all running Tamil text in the corpus.
221 of them cover half of it.
Tamil at a glance
The short answers, straight from the corpus.
- Words for half of speech
- 221
- Words for 80%
- 2,841
- Most common word
- நான்
- Corpus size
- 146,443 tokens
Entries needed to cover 50% of everything said in Tamil
Entries needed to cover 80% of running Tamil text
“I” — said 5,785 times in the Tamil corpus
20,529 distinct Tamil word forms were counted
Mixed rounds
Tamil · All three modes, shuffled
Loading Tamil…
The ten most common Tamil entries
Together they cover 16.1% of everything said in the corpus.
- 1 நான் I 5.8K×
- 2 நீங்கள் You 3.9K×
- 3 ஒரு A / One 3K×
- 4 இல்லை No 2K×
- 5 என்ன What 1.8K×
- 6 வேண்டும் Want / Should 1.7K×
- 7 என்று that 1.7K×
- 8 இந்த This 1.3K×
- 9 என் My 1.2K×
- 10 சரி Okay 1.2K×
How far each slice of the list gets you
Share of running Tamil text covered by everything up to that rank.
The six bands, in Tamil
The same bands the game asks you to guess.
| Band | Entries | Phrases | Median Zipf | Text covered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 100 | 100 | 1 | 6.33 | 40.6% |
| 101–500 | 400 | 17 | 5.61 | 19.3% |
| 501–1,000 | 500 | 14 | 5.20 | 8.2% |
| 1,001–2,000 | 1,000 | 0 | 4.88 | 8.0% |
| 2,001–4,000 | 2,000 | 0 | 4.53 | 7.4% |
| 4,001–8,000 | 4,000 | 0 | 4.14 | 6.6% |
Word shape
Character lengths across the Tamil top 1,000 — average 3.8.
Characters per word
Phrases that behave like words
32 multi-word units earned a rank of their own.
- #81 தயவு செய்து Please
- #185 எனக்கு தெரியாது I don't know
- #195 நான் உன்னை I love you
- #208 நான் வருந்துகிறேன் I regret / I am sorry
- #260 ஒரு சிறிய A small
- #280 நாம் போகலாம் We can go / Let's go
- #281 நான் சத்தியம் செய்கிறேன் I swear
- #312 என்ன நடக்கிறது What is happening
What stands out in Tamil
Read straight off this language's own numbers.
- Just 221 entries cover half of everything said in the Tamil subtitle corpus.
- The ten most common Tamil entries alone account for 16.1% of running text.
- 32 of the top 8,797 entries are multi-word phrases that behave like single units — the most common is “தயவு செய்து”.
- The longest single word inside the Tamil top 1,000 is “worldwide7477” (13 characters, rank 740).
- Most of the Tamil top 1,000 is short: 4-character words are the single largest group, and the average is 3.8 characters.
- Frequency falls away fast: the whole 4,001–8,000 band together covers only 6.6% of the corpus.
How this Tamil ranking was calculated
Built once, offline, and shipped as static data.
The source is the Tamil side of OpenSubtitles v2018 via OPUS — 146,443 tokens of transcribed speech, which is closer to how people talk than a newspaper or Wikipedia corpus would be.
Words are counted using Tamil'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. 20,529 distinct words appear in all; the 8,797 most common are kept.
Repeated word sequences that hold together are promoted into the same ranking as single words, which is why 32 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. 269 of the 8,797 Tamil entries are still unresolved and are never used as game questions.
Common questions about Tamil word frequency
Answered from this language's own corpus.
How many Tamil words do you need to know?
Around 221 Tamil words and phrases cover half of everything said in ordinary speech, and about 2,841 cover 80%. Coverage climbs steeply at first and then flattens: the whole top 8,797 reaches 90.1%, so the last few thousand entries add far less than the first few hundred.
What are the most common Tamil words?
The ten most common Tamil entries are நான் (I), நீங்கள் (You), ஒரு (A / One), இல்லை (No), என்ன (What), வேண்டும் (Want / Should), என்று (that), இந்த (This), என் (My) and சரி (Okay). Together they account for 16.1% of all running Tamil text in the corpus.
What is the most common word in Tamil?
The most common Tamil word is “நான்”, meaning “I”. It appears 5,785 times across the corpus, which is 4.0% of everything said.
How is this Tamil frequency list calculated?
The list is built from the Tamil side of the OpenSubtitles corpus — 146,443 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 20,529 distinct forms found are ranked by raw count. The top 8,797 are kept, each with a per-million rate, a Zipf score, and its cumulative share of running text.
Does the Tamil list include phrases as well as words?
Yes. 32 of the 8,797 Tamil entries are multi-word phrases that repeat tightly enough to behave like single vocabulary items — the most common is “தயவு செய்து” (Please), at rank 81. They are ranked alongside single words rather than in a separate list, because knowing them as units is what fluency looks like.
How much Tamil do the top 100 words cover?
The 100 most common Tamil entries cover 40.6% of running text by themselves. That is why they are worth learning first: no other 100 items in the language come close.
Is the Tamil frequency dictionary free to download?
Yes. All 8,528 translated Tamil 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 Tamil's.