Urdu
frequency dictionary
The Urdu frequency dictionary ranks the 8,912 most common Urdu words and phrases, measured across 280,677 tokens of subtitle dialogue from the OpenSubtitles corpus. Learning the top 76 Urdu entries covers half of everything said, and the top 1,192 covers 80%. The single most common Urdu word is “ہے” (is / Yes), which accounts for 4.1% of running text on its own. Every entry carries its rank, raw count, Zipf score, and an English translation.
Corpus
These 8,912 entries account for 93.4% of all running Urdu text in the corpus.
76 of them cover half of it.
Urdu at a glance
The short answers, straight from the corpus.
- Words for half of speech
- 76
- Words for 80%
- 1,192
- Most common word
- ہے
- Corpus size
- 280,677 tokens
Entries needed to cover 50% of everything said in Urdu
Entries needed to cover 80% of running Urdu text
“is / Yes” — said 11,418 times in the Urdu corpus
12,093 distinct Urdu word forms were counted
Mixed rounds
Urdu · All three modes, shuffled
Loading Urdu…
The ten most common Urdu entries
Together they cover 22.6% of everything said in the corpus.
- 1 ہے is / Yes 11.4K×
- 2 میں I 10K×
- 3 کے of 9.5K×
- 4 آپ you 5.3K×
- 5 نہیں not / No 5.2K×
- 6 کی of 4.8K×
- 7 سے from 4.6K×
- 8 ایک a / One 4.5K×
- 9 ہیں are / Yes 4.3K×
- 10 اس this 3.9K×
How far each slice of the list gets you
Share of running Urdu text covered by everything up to that rank.
The six bands, in Urdu
The same bands the game asks you to guess.
| Band | Entries | Phrases | Median Zipf | Text covered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 100 | 100 | 17 | 6.37 | 53.5% |
| 101–500 | 400 | 94 | 5.55 | 18.2% |
| 501–1,000 | 500 | 137 | 5.10 | 6.6% |
| 1,001–2,000 | 1,000 | 111 | 4.81 | 6.5% |
| 2,001–4,000 | 2,000 | 0 | 4.40 | 5.2% |
| 4,001–8,000 | 4,000 | 0 | 3.85 | 3.4% |
Word shape
Character lengths across the Urdu top 1,000 — average 3.7.
Characters per word
Phrases that behave like words
359 multi-word units earned a rank of their own.
- #20 کے لئے for
- #26 آپ کو you
- #27 میں نے I have
- #42 ٹھیک ہے okay
- #43 رہے ہیں are / have remained
- #45 کے ساتھ with
- #54 جی ہاں yes
- #60 کرنے کے لئے to do
What stands out in Urdu
Read straight off this language's own numbers.
- Just 76 entries cover half of everything said in the Urdu subtitle corpus.
- The ten most common Urdu entries alone account for 22.6% of running text.
- 359 of the top 8,912 entries are multi-word phrases that behave like single units — the most common is “کے لئے”.
- The longest single word inside the Urdu top 1,000 is “کراکوژیہ” (8 characters, rank 595).
- Most of the Urdu top 1,000 is short: 4-character words are the single largest group, and the average is 3.7 characters.
- Frequency falls away fast: the whole 4,001–8,000 band together covers only 3.4% of the corpus.
How this Urdu ranking was calculated
Built once, offline, and shipped as static data.
The source is the Urdu side of OpenSubtitles v2018 via OPUS — 280,677 tokens of transcribed speech, which is closer to how people talk than a newspaper or Wikipedia corpus would be.
Words are counted using Urdu'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. 12,093 distinct words appear in all; the 8,912 most common are kept.
Repeated word sequences that hold together are promoted into the same ranking as single words, which is why 359 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. 937 of the 8,912 Urdu entries are still unresolved and are never used as game questions.
Common questions about Urdu word frequency
Answered from this language's own corpus.
How many Urdu words do you need to know?
Around 76 Urdu words and phrases cover half of everything said in ordinary speech, and about 1,192 cover 80%. Coverage climbs steeply at first and then flattens: the whole top 8,912 reaches 93.4%, so the last few thousand entries add far less than the first few hundred.
What are the most common Urdu words?
The ten most common Urdu entries are ہے (is / Yes), میں (I), کے (of), آپ (you), نہیں (not / No), کی (of), سے (from), ایک (a / One), ہیں (are / Yes) and اس (this). Together they account for 22.6% of all running Urdu text in the corpus.
What is the most common word in Urdu?
The most common Urdu word is “ہے”, meaning “is / Yes”. It appears 11,418 times across the corpus, which is 4.1% of everything said.
How is this Urdu frequency list calculated?
The list is built from the Urdu side of the OpenSubtitles corpus — 280,677 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 12,093 distinct forms found are ranked by raw count. The top 8,912 are kept, each with a per-million rate, a Zipf score, and its cumulative share of running text.
Does the Urdu list include phrases as well as words?
Yes. 359 of the 8,912 Urdu entries are multi-word phrases that repeat tightly enough to behave like single vocabulary items — the most common is “کے لئے” (for), at rank 20. They are ranked alongside single words rather than in a separate list, because knowing them as units is what fluency looks like.
How much Urdu do the top 100 words cover?
The 100 most common Urdu entries cover 53.5% of running text by themselves. That is why they are worth learning first: no other 100 items in the language come close.
Is the Urdu frequency dictionary free to download?
Yes. All 7,975 translated Urdu 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 Urdu's.