The 100 most common Esperanto nouns (with word families)

The most common Esperanto nouns are homo "person", tempo "time", libro "book", infano "child", jaro "year" and lingvo "language". The 100 most frequent nouns in our list of 1,000 common words make up 5.2% of all words in a corpus of 5.8 million words of everyday Esperanto sentences, and the ten most frequent alone make up 1.3%. Every noun ends in -o, so you can spot one at a glance, and the table below shows two or three more words built from the same root.

#Every noun ends in -o, with -j for the plural and -n for the object

Add -j for more than one and -n for the direct object. If a noun needs both, the order is always -j and then -n. There are no exceptions; see nouns and adjectives and the accusative.

Esperanto has only the article la, "the", and it never changes: la libro, la libroj, la librojn. There is no word for "a": libro means "a book" or just "book".

#Nouns for people: -in- makes the female form

Esperanto has no grammatical gender. Most words for people, such as homo, infano, amiko, persono, instruisto, kuracisto and studento, say nothing about sex. A few roots are male by meaning, and the suffix -in- makes the female form. Six such pairs are among the 100 most common nouns; the numbers are ranks in the list.

The prefix ge- names both sexes together: gepatroj "parents", gefratoj "brothers and sisters", gefiloj "sons and daughters", geedzoj "husband and wife". See suffixes and prefixes.

#The 10 nouns to learn first

This is our own choice, not an official list. Six of the ten are among the 20 most frequent nouns in the table. Nomo, akvo, demando and familio come further down, but a beginner needs them in the first conversation.

#The 100 most common Esperanto nouns

Rank is the position of the noun among all 1,000 words of the list, so homo at 55 is the first noun: the 54 words before it are 38 grammar words, 12 verbs and 4 adverbs. The column Family shows two or three words built from the same root (fewer where ReVo, the Reta Vortaro, lists fewer); the meanings are shortened from ReVo. The examples are our own. Esperanto and Dio are written with a capital letter by custom. Look up any noun in the dictionary.

Most families use a suffix or a prefix on the root: dom·et·o "cottage" is "house + small" and bo·patr·o "father-in-law" is "in-law + father". Others join two roots: dormo·ĉambro "bedroom". The same root also gives words of other classes, such as the verb vivi and the adjective viva next to vivo. The rules are on word building.

#Nouns from verbs and adjectives

A root has no word class of its own; the ending decides. So eight of the 100 nouns share their root with one of the 100 most common verbs:

A few more pairs sit further down the list: nomo and nomi "to name" (372), eraro and erari "to err" (633), danko and danki "to thank" (635), celo and celi "to aim" (706), plano and plani "to plan" (721).

These endings make new nouns from verbs and adjectives:

PMEG gives a rule of thumb: -eco always names a quality or a state, while -aĵo usually names a concrete thing. So beleco is "being beautiful" and belaĵo is "something beautiful". All suffixes are on suffixes.

#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. Plural -j and accusative -n are removed, so libro, libroj and libron count together under libro; the method is on the common words page.

• 359 of the 1,000 entries are nouns (35.9%). Their per_million values add up to 86,593 per million, so nouns are 8.7% of all words in the corpus. Verbs make up 17.6%.
• 8 of the 100 most common words are nouns, and 62 of the first 300.
• The 100 most frequent nouns sit at ranks 55 to 411 of the list. Their per_million values add up to 52,217, which is 5.2% of all words and 60.3% of all noun occurrences covered by the list.
• The first 10, 20 and 50 nouns make up 1.3%, 2.2% and 3.8% of all words. Homo alone makes up 0.2%.

The word classes come from the endings: an entry ending in -o counts as a noun, except grammar words such as kio and tio, which count as correlatives. A derived noun is counted separately, so patro and patrino are two nouns. Names written with a capital letter (Maria, Parizo) were left out, except Esperanto and Dio. 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 nouns in Esperanto?

In our list the ten most frequent nouns are homo, tempo, libro, infano, jaro, lingvo, vivo, tago, domo and mono. Together they make up 1.3% of all words in the Tatoeba corpus.

#How many Esperanto nouns do I need to know?

The 20 most frequent nouns cover 2.2% of all words in our corpus, the 50 most frequent cover 3.8% and the 100 most frequent cover 5.2%. Nouns are 8.7% of all words in total, because the same few grammar words and verbs come back in every sentence: grammar words alone make up 44.4%. For the other word classes, see the 1,000-word list.

#How do you form the plural of an Esperanto noun?

Add -j to the noun: libro → libroj. For the object, add -n after it: librojn. All nouns follow this rule, and the article la does not change.

#Do Esperanto nouns have gender?

No. Esperanto has no grammatical gender. Most words for people, such as amiko "friend", say nothing about sex, and the suffix -in- makes the female form of roots that are male by meaning: patro "father" → patrino "mother".

#How do you make a noun from a verb or an adjective in Esperanto?

Change the ending: labori "to work" → laboro "work". For a continuing action add -ad- (skribado), for a concrete thing -aĵ- (manĝaĵo), for a quality -ec- (beleco) and for a person with a quality -ul- (riĉulo). See suffixes.

#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): entries such as domo, patro, knabo, studi and skribi, read on 8 October 2026; the meanings of the family words are shortened from ReVo
• PMEG: Bazaj reguloj por O-vortoj, Seksa signifo de O-vortoj, and the suffix pages AD, AĴ and EC
• 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