The most common Esperanto adjectives (with opposites)

The most common Esperanto adjectives are bona "good", alia "other", granda "big", multa "many", bela "beautiful" and nova "new". Our list of 1,000 common words contains 120 adjectives, all shown below. Together they make up 3.2% of all words in a corpus of 5.8 million words of everyday Esperanto sentences, and the ten most frequent make up 1.2%. An adjective ends in -a and copies the -j and -n of its noun, so one short lesson on nouns and adjectives covers all 120.

#One ending, two agreement endings

Every adjective in the list ends in -a, except ambaŭ "both". Add -j for the plural and -n for the object, always in that order.

• After esti there is no -n: La libro estas nova. – "The book is new." La libroj estas novaj. – "The books are new."
• Order is free. Nova libro and libro nova are both correct; PMEG notes that an adjective after its noun is often emphasised.
• Without a noun. Language names drop the word lingvo: Ŝi parolas la francan. – "She speaks French." Quantity adjectives often stand alone: Multaj scias tion. – "Many people know that."
• Ambaŭ is the exception. It takes neither -j nor -n, and it does not combine with la: ambaŭ knabinoj – "both girls", Mi vidis ambaŭ knabinojn. – "I saw both girls."

#The 10 adjectives to learn first

This is our own choice, not an official list. Six of the ten are the six most frequent adjectives of all: bona, alia, granda, multa, bela and nova. The next four in frequency, tuta "whole", kelka "some", sola "alone" and unua "first", work like small words for quantity and order and come right after. In their place we take the opposites malbona and malgranda, plus feliĉa and malfacila, because a beginner needs them in the first conversations.

#The 120 most common Esperanto adjectives

Rank is the position of the adjective among all 1,000 words of the list, so bona at 57 is the first adjective to appear. The Opposite column shows the word you would use for the reverse meaning: the mal- word if ReVo, the Reta Vortaro, has it with the plain opposite sense, otherwise a separate word that ReVo defines against it or lists as its antonym, and – where we found no natural pair. Rare words with a narrow sense, such as malpropra or malpreta, are left out. The examples are our own; look up any adjective in the dictionary.

Four notes on the table:

• Opposites. 71 of the 120 adjectives have one: 52 through mal- and 19 through a separate word. The 49 dashes include colours, nationalities and ordinals, which have no opposite, and adjectives such as amuza or freneza, where no single word is the natural reverse. For a plain negation use ne: nekonata "unknown", nenecesa "unnecessary". These are not opposites; the difference is explained on Esperanto opposites.
• Participles. Ten entries are participles used as adjectives: venonta, pasinta, farita, okupata, ŝatata, mortinta, malfermita, okupita, fermita and konata. See participles.
• Okupata and okupita. Both are passive participles of okupi and both mean "busy". Zamenhof wrote that usage calls for mi estas okupita (Lingvaj Respondoj, quoted in ReVo). PMEG also finds okupita the more usual form but says that either one works for being kept busy by work, with no practical difference. In our list okupata (617) is the more frequent of the two. A seat that is taken is okupita.
• Colours. The eight colours are ruĝa, blanka, verda, nigra, blua, bruna, flava and griza; more shades and the use of hel- and mal-hel- are on the colours page.

#Opposites: mal- and separate words

Thirteen adjectives in the list begin with mal-, and twelve pairs are in the list with both words: bona and malbona, granda and malgranda, multa and malmulta, nova and malnova, juna and maljuna, longa and mallonga, sama and malsama, plena and malplena, riĉa and malriĉa, varma and malvarma, facila and malfacila, fermita and malfermita. One root gives you both ends of the scale; see prefixes and the 74 pairs on the opposites page.

Other opposites are two separate words, so mal- does not help. These pairs are in the table above:

#Comparing: pli, plej, ol

Adjectives take no comparative ending. Pli means "more", plej "most", ol "than" and tiel … kiel "as … as". There are no irregular forms: "better" is pli bona and "worse" is pli malbona. The full rules are on comparison.

Adjectives such as unua "first" or franca "French" name a fixed position or origin, so they are rarely compared. To change strength inside the word, use the suffix -eg-: bona → bonega "excellent", bela → belega "gorgeous" and granda → grandega "huge" are all in the list.

#Adjectives made from other words

The ending -a adds the idea "having or related to what the root says" (PMEG): homa is "related to people", longa "having length". The exact sense depends on the root and the context, so check unfamiliar words in the dictionary. Most adjectives you meet are built from other words by word building.

#How we counted

We counted on 8 October 2026 in our file esperanto-1000-common-words.csv. It comes from 822,296 Tatoeba sentences with 5,831,657 words. Every adjective form counts under its -a form, without plural -j and accusative -n. The method is on the common words page.

• 120 of the 1,000 entries are adjectives (12.0%). Their per_million values add up to 31,786 per million, so adjectives are 3.2% of all words in the corpus, or 4.1% of the words that the 1,000-word list covers.
• Verbs, nouns and adverbs in the same list make up 17.6% (313 entries), 8.7% (359) and 4.6% (89). Adjectives are many but each is rare: the most frequent, bona, occurs 1,958 times per million words, while esti occurs 40,934 times. See the most common verbs.
• Only 4 of the 100 most common words are adjectives (bona 57, alia 63, granda 81, multa 82). There are 25 in the first 300 words and 46 in the first 500.
• The 10, 20, 50 and 100 most frequent adjectives make up 1.2%, 1.6%, 2.4% and 3.0% of all words, which is 37%, 51%, 74% and 94% of all adjective occurrences in the list.

The word class comes from the ending: an entry in -a is an adjective. Possessives (mia, via) and the correlatives kia, tia, ia, ĉia and nenia are counted in their own classes, while kioma, which asks for a number in a series, and ambaŭ are counted as adjectives. Five groups stand out:

Malfermita is both a mal- word and a participle. Tatoeba holds short, written, often translated sentences; novels or speech would give another order, as the list on Vocabulary shows.

#Common questions

#What are the most common adjectives in Esperanto?

In our list the ten most frequent are bona, alia, granda, multa, bela, nova, tuta, kelka, sola and unua. Together they make up 1.2% of all words in the Tatoeba corpus; bona "good" alone is about one word in 500.

#How do you form an adjective in Esperanto?

Put -a after a root: danĝer- gives danĝera "dangerous". Add -j for the plural and -n for the object: danĝeraj stratoj, danĝerajn stratojn. See nouns and adjectives.

#How do you say the opposite of an adjective in Esperanto?

Put mal- in front: granda "big" → malgranda "small". Some opposites are separate words, such as nigra – blanka "black – white"; see opposites.

#How do you say "better" and "the best" in Esperanto?

Use pli bona for "better" and la plej bona for "the best". Nothing is irregular; the same pli and plej work with every adjective (comparison).

#Does the adjective come before or after the noun?

Usually before, but both orders are correct: granda domo and domo granda mean the same. After the noun, the adjective is often emphasised (PMEG).

#Sources

• Esperantopedia: 1000 most common Esperanto words (CSV, rank, part of speech, English meaning, frequency per million), counted on 8 October 2026; method on this page
• Tatoeba: downloads – Esperanto sentences, downloaded 7 October 2026; licence CC BY 2.0 FR
• Reta Vortaro (ReVo), read on 8 October 2026: entries bona, alia, juna, nigra, laca, vigla, enui, sekura, moderna, terura, kara, okupi, venonta, pasinta and mal-
• PMEG: Bazaj reguloj por A-vortoj, Uzo de A-vortoj, Ambaŭ, Kvantaj A-vortoj, Specialaj okazoj de participelekto, MAL
• Wiktionary: Esperanto lemmas (CC BY-SA 4.0) and ESPDIC by Paul Denisowski (CC BY 3.0), the sources of the English meanings in the list