Traditional Chinese
frequency dictionary
The Traditional Chinese frequency dictionary ranks the 8,751 most common Traditional Chinese words and phrases, measured across 7,128,415 tokens of subtitle dialogue from the OpenSubtitles corpus. Learning the top 310 Traditional Chinese entries covers half of everything said, and the top 3,132 covers 80%. The single most common Traditional Chinese word is “我” (I), which accounts for 3.2% of running text on its own. Every entry carries its rank, raw count, Zipf score, and an English translation.
Corpus
These 8,751 entries account for 88.9% of all running Traditional Chinese text in the corpus.
310 of them cover half of it.
Traditional Chinese at a glance
The short answers, straight from the corpus.
- Words for half of speech
- 310
- Words for 80%
- 3,132
- Most common word
- 我
- Corpus size
- 7,128,415 tokens
Entries needed to cover 50% of everything said in Traditional Chinese
Entries needed to cover 80% of running Traditional Chinese text
“I” — said 227,040 times in the Traditional Chinese corpus
73,511 distinct Traditional Chinese word forms were counted
Mixed rounds
Traditional Chinese · All three modes, shuffled
Loading Traditional Chinese…
The ten most common Traditional Chinese entries
Together they cover 15.7% of everything said in the corpus.
- 1 我 I 227K×
- 2 的 the / of 219.3K×
- 3 你 you 208.1K×
- 4 了 did 120.3K×
- 5 我們 we 68.9K×
- 6 是 is / Yes 62.5K×
- 7 他 he 62.2K×
- 8 嗎 ? 52.5K×
- 9 и and 52.3K×
- 10 在 at / In 46.8K×
How far each slice of the list gets you
Share of running Traditional Chinese text covered by everything up to that rank.
The six bands, in Traditional Chinese
The same bands the game asks you to guess.
| Band | Entries | Phrases | Median Zipf | Text covered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 100 | 100 | 0 | 6.31 | 35.9% |
| 101–500 | 400 | 13 | 5.64 | 20.6% |
| 501–1,000 | 500 | 22 | 5.25 | 9.3% |
| 1,001–2,000 | 1,000 | 58 | 4.93 | 9.0% |
| 2,001–4,000 | 2,000 | 124 | 4.58 | 7.9% |
| 4,001–8,000 | 4,000 | 334 | 4.17 | 6.3% |
Word shape
Character lengths across the Traditional Chinese top 1,000 — average 1.5.
Characters per word
Phrases that behave like words
627 multi-word units earned a rank of their own.
- #127 ぐ 或 ぐ or / Or
- #227 的 話 if / That's all.
- #228 我 不知道 I don't know
- #237 的 時候 when / At that time
- #260 這 里 here
- #266 告訴 我 tell me
- #355 告訴 你 tell you
- #372 殺 了 killed
What stands out in Traditional Chinese
Read straight off this language's own numbers.
- Just 310 entries cover half of everything said in the Traditional Chinese subtitle corpus.
- The ten most common Traditional Chinese entries alone account for 15.7% of running text.
- 627 of the top 8,751 entries are multi-word phrases that behave like single units — the most common is “ぐ 或”.
- The longest single word inside the Traditional Chinese top 1,000 is “怎麼回事” (4 characters, rank 711).
- Most of the Traditional Chinese top 1,000 is short: 1-character words are the single largest group, and the average is 1.5 characters.
- Frequency falls away fast: the whole 4,001–8,000 band together covers only 6.3% of the corpus.
How this Traditional Chinese ranking was calculated
Built once, offline, and shipped as static data.
The source is the Traditional Chinese side of OpenSubtitles v2018 via OPUS — 7,128,415 tokens of transcribed speech, which is closer to how people talk than a newspaper or Wikipedia corpus would be.
Words are counted using Traditional 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. 73,511 distinct words appear in all; the 8,751 most common are kept.
Repeated word sequences that hold together are promoted into the same ranking as single words, which is why 627 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. 78 of the 8,751 Traditional Chinese entries are still unresolved and are never used as game questions.
Common questions about Traditional Chinese word frequency
Answered from this language's own corpus.
How many Traditional Chinese words do you need to know?
Around 310 Traditional Chinese words and phrases cover half of everything said in ordinary speech, and about 3,132 cover 80%. Coverage climbs steeply at first and then flattens: the whole top 8,751 reaches 88.9%, so the last few thousand entries add far less than the first few hundred.
What are the most common Traditional Chinese words?
The ten most common Traditional Chinese entries are 我 (I), 的 (the / of), 你 (you), 了 (did), 我們 (we), 是 (is / Yes), 他 (he), 嗎 (?), и (and) and 在 (at / In). Together they account for 15.7% of all running Traditional Chinese text in the corpus.
What is the most common word in Traditional Chinese?
The most common Traditional Chinese word is “我”, meaning “I”. It appears 227,040 times across the corpus, which is 3.2% of everything said.
How is this Traditional Chinese frequency list calculated?
The list is built from the Traditional Chinese side of the OpenSubtitles corpus — 7,128,415 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 73,511 distinct forms found are ranked by raw count. The top 8,751 are kept, each with a per-million rate, a Zipf score, and its cumulative share of running text.
Does the Traditional Chinese list include phrases as well as words?
Yes. 627 of the 8,751 Traditional Chinese entries are multi-word phrases that repeat tightly enough to behave like single vocabulary items — the most common is “ぐ 或” (ぐ or / Or), at rank 127. They are ranked alongside single words rather than in a separate list, because knowing them as units is what fluency looks like.
How much Traditional Chinese do the top 100 words cover?
The 100 most common Traditional Chinese entries cover 35.9% of running text by themselves. That is why they are worth learning first: no other 100 items in the language come close.
Is the Traditional Chinese frequency dictionary free to download?
Yes. All 8,673 translated Traditional 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 Traditional Chinese's.