Thai
frequency dictionary
The Thai frequency dictionary ranks the 8,683 most common Thai words and phrases, measured across 62,253,234 tokens of subtitle dialogue from the OpenSubtitles corpus. Learning the top 77 Thai entries covers half of everything said, and the top 669 covers 80%. The single most common Thai word is “ฉัน” (jag / I), which accounts for 2.2% of running text on its own. Every entry carries its rank, raw count, Zipf score, and an English translation.
Corpus
These 8,683 entries account for 94.0% of all running Thai text in the corpus.
77 of them cover half of it.
Thai at a glance
The short answers, straight from the corpus.
- Words for half of speech
- 77
- Words for 80%
- 669
- Most common word
- ฉัน
- Corpus size
- 62,253,234 tokens
Entries needed to cover 50% of everything said in Thai
Entries needed to cover 80% of running Thai text
“jag / I” — said 1,360,197 times in the Thai corpus
211,046 distinct Thai word forms were counted
Mixed rounds
Thai · All three modes, shuffled
Loading Thai…
The ten most common Thai entries
Together they cover 16.4% of everything said in the corpus.
- 1 ฉัน jag / I 1.4M×
- 2 ที่ som / At 1.3M×
- 3 จะ kommer / Yes 1.3M×
- 4 ไม่ inte / No 1.1M×
- 5 คุณ du / You 1M×
- 6 ได้ att / Yes 892.1K×
- 7 ไป gå / Go 885.5K×
- 8 ว่า att / That 828.3K×
- 9 เป็น vara / Yes 760.3K×
- 10 แล้ว redan / Then 711.5K×
How far each slice of the list gets you
Share of running Thai text covered by everything up to that rank.
The six bands, in Thai
The same bands the game asks you to guess.
| Band | Entries | Phrases | Median Zipf | Text covered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 100 | 100 | 2 | 6.55 | 54.9% |
| 101–500 | 400 | 38 | 5.60 | 22.1% |
| 501–1,000 | 500 | 60 | 5.10 | 6.7% |
| 1,001–2,000 | 1,000 | 169 | 4.68 | 5.1% |
| 2,001–4,000 | 2,000 | 547 | 4.18 | 3.3% |
| 4,001–8,000 | 4,000 | 1,299 | 3.64 | 1.9% |
Word shape
Character lengths across the Thai top 1,000 — average 2.9.
Characters per word
Phrases that behave like words
2,358 multi-word units earned a rank of their own.
- #48 เห รอ vänta / Huh?
- #95 คิด ว่า tror att / I think
- #103 ยัง ไง hur är det / How?
- #112 ตอน นี้ just nu / Right now
- #140 สิ่ง ที่ Det som / Things that
- #153 แบบ นี้ så här / Like this
- #183 กลับ มา komma tillbaka / Come back
- #189 ผู้ หญิง kvinna / Women
What stands out in Thai
Read straight off this language's own numbers.
- Just 77 entries cover half of everything said in the Thai subtitle corpus.
- The ten most common Thai entries alone account for 16.4% of running text.
- 2,358 of the top 8,683 entries are multi-word phrases that behave like single units — the most common is “เห รอ”.
- The longest single word inside the Thai top 1,000 is “เปลี่ยนแปลง” (9 characters, rank 926).
- Most of the Thai top 1,000 is short: 2-character words are the single largest group, and the average is 2.9 characters.
- Frequency falls away fast: the whole 4,001–8,000 band together covers only 1.9% of the corpus.
How this Thai ranking was calculated
Built once, offline, and shipped as static data.
The source is the Thai side of OpenSubtitles v2018 via OPUS — 62,253,234 tokens of transcribed speech, which is closer to how people talk than a newspaper or Wikipedia corpus would be.
Words are counted using Thai'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. 211,046 distinct words appear in all; the 8,683 most common are kept.
Repeated word sequences that hold together are promoted into the same ranking as single words, which is why 2,358 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. 214 of the 8,683 Thai entries are still unresolved and are never used as game questions.
Common questions about Thai word frequency
Answered from this language's own corpus.
How many Thai words do you need to know?
Around 77 Thai words and phrases cover half of everything said in ordinary speech, and about 669 cover 80%. Coverage climbs steeply at first and then flattens: the whole top 8,683 reaches 94.0%, so the last few thousand entries add far less than the first few hundred.
What are the most common Thai words?
The ten most common Thai entries are ฉัน (jag / I), ที่ (som / At), จะ (kommer / Yes), ไม่ (inte / No), คุณ (du / You), ได้ (att / Yes), ไป (gå / Go), ว่า (att / That), เป็น (vara / Yes) and แล้ว (redan / Then). Together they account for 16.4% of all running Thai text in the corpus.
What is the most common word in Thai?
The most common Thai word is “ฉัน”, meaning “jag / I”. It appears 1,360,197 times across the corpus, which is 2.2% of everything said.
How is this Thai frequency list calculated?
The list is built from the Thai side of the OpenSubtitles corpus — 62,253,234 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 211,046 distinct forms found are ranked by raw count. The top 8,683 are kept, each with a per-million rate, a Zipf score, and its cumulative share of running text.
Does the Thai list include phrases as well as words?
Yes. 2,358 of the 8,683 Thai entries are multi-word phrases that repeat tightly enough to behave like single vocabulary items — the most common is “เห รอ” (vänta / Huh?), at rank 48. They are ranked alongside single words rather than in a separate list, because knowing them as units is what fluency looks like.
How much Thai do the top 100 words cover?
The 100 most common Thai entries cover 54.9% of running text by themselves. That is why they are worth learning first: no other 100 items in the language come close.
Is the Thai frequency dictionary free to download?
Yes. All 8,469 translated Thai 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 Thai's.