1000 most common Esperanto words – list and download

The 100 most common Esperanto words make up 55.2% of all words in a corpus of 5.8 million words of Esperanto sentences. The 500 most common make up 72.2%, and the 1,000 most common make up 78.4%. Below are the first 300 words with English meanings. All 1,000 are in a free CSV file and an Anki file for flashcards. To learn them, use the flashcards.

55.2%

of the words in everyday sentences, if you know the 100 most common

How many words do you know?

0%25%50%75%100%

words recognised in sentenceswords known

11002505007501,000

Next words to learn

1. donito give101
2. postafter, behind102
3. domohouse103
4. ĉeat, by104
5. nenionothing105
6. hodiaŭtoday106
7. trotoo, too much107
8. ankaŭalso, too108
9. plufurther, any more109
10. helpito help110
11. aĉetito buy111
12. restito remain, stay112

Counted on 822,296 sentences (5,831,657 words) from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR). Word list: Esperantopedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

#Download the 1,000-word list

The column per_million shows how often the word occurs in one million words of the corpus. If letters such as ĉ and ŝ look wrong in a spreadsheet, import the CSV file as UTF-8.

In Anki, import the text file from the main window. Anki detects the tab separator; you then choose which column goes to which field of the card, for example the first column to the front and the second to the back.

Both files are free to copy, share and adapt under the licence CC BY-SA 4.0. Credit "Esperantopedia (esperantopedia.org)" and share your version under the same licence. The files build on sentences from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), meanings from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0) and ESPDIC by Paul Denisowski (CC BY 3.0). See the sources at the end of this page.

#How much of a text do the most common words cover?

A few words do most of the work. The 10 most common words alone make up more than a quarter of all words in the corpus.

100%80%60%40%20%0%

01,0002,0003,000

Show the data

Most common words	Share of all words in the corpus
10	26.9%
25	38.4%
50	47.3%
100	55.2%
200	63.2%
300	67.4%
500	72.2%
750	75.9%
1,000	78.4%
1,500	81.8%
2,000	84.0%
3,000	86.6%

The curve flattens quickly. The first 64 words reach 50%, 394 words reach 70%, 1,207 words reach 80%, and about 2,300 words reach 85%.

The last few percent are spread over a long tail of rare words. Part of the corpus can never be covered by a vocabulary list: 1.2% of all words are names that we left out, and another 2.5% were not recognised as Esperanto words (mostly names such as Tom and Mary, abbreviations and typing errors).

The written-text list on Vocabulary gives similar figures: its top 100 cover 52.7% and its top 1,000 cover 76.2% of a different corpus.

#What the list contains

Grammar words dominate the first hundred. Of the first 100 words, 59 are grammar words: the article, pronouns, possessives, correlatives, prepositions, conjunctions, particles and numbers. In the whole list there are 119 of them, and together they make up 44.4% of all words in the corpus. Thirty-three are correlatives, which come from one table of 45 words (see correlatives).

Verbs carry a lot of text. The 313 verbs in the list make up 17.6% of all words, the 359 nouns only 8.7%. The pronoun mi "I" is number 2 and vi "you" number 4. In the written-text list on Vocabulary, mi is only number 7.

The ten most common words of each class:

#Esperanto words 1–100

#Esperanto words 101–200

#Esperanto words 201–300

#Esperanto words 301–1000

The CSV and Anki files continue to word 1,000. Words 301–1000 are mostly everyday nouns, verbs and adjectives, for example fenestro "window" (301), trajno "train" (307), ĝardeno "garden" (352) and flughaveno "airport" (984). The 1,000th word, fingro "finger", occurs about 86 times in every million words, or 503 times in the whole corpus.

#How this list differs from the Vocabulary page

The Vocabulary page ranks words from the Tekstaro, a corpus of written Esperanto texts. This page ranks words from short, everyday sentences. The core is the same: 75 of the 100 words in the Vocabulary list are also in the top 100 here, and all 100 are in the top 1,000 here.

The words that appear only in the Tekstaro top 100 are mostly small grammar words just below our top 100, such as ankaŭ "also" (108), ĉar "because" (115) and eĉ "even" (122), and words typical of written Esperanto: Esperanto (284) and internacia "international" (952). The words that appear only in our top 100 are everyday verbs and nouns: iri "to go", ŝati "to like", paroli "to speak", pensi "to think", manĝi "to eat", libro "book" and infano "child".

#How to learn the list

Learn the words in sentences, not as a bare list. The free course teaches grammar and vocabulary in context, and the dictionary shows example sentences for many words.

Learn the correlatives as a system. A table of 45 words (kiu, tiu, iu, ĉiu, neniu and their relatives kio, kia, kie, kiam…) gives 33 entries of this list. Memorising the pattern is faster than memorising 33 separate words; see correlatives.

Use affixes to get more words than the list contains. By our word-building analyser, the 881 entries that are not grammar words are built from about 640 roots, and 42 entries begin with mal- (bona "good" – malbona "bad"). Once you know a root and the common affixes, many words not on the list become guessable. See word building.

For estimates of the study time that a working vocabulary takes, see How long does it take to learn Esperanto?. The figures there are rough and come from old studies.

#How was the list made?

1. Corpus. We used all 822,296 Esperanto sentences in the Tatoeba export that we downloaded on 7 October 2026, counting every sentence once. Tatoeba is a community collection of sentences, many translated from other languages. The Esperanto sentences come from 947 contributors, and three sentences have no listed owner.
2. Words. Every run of letters is one word, which gives 5,831,657 words. Spellings with cx, gx and so on were turned into ĉ, ĝ; abbreviations such as s-ro were expanded to sinjoro.
3. Dictionary forms. We removed plural -j and accusative -n. All verb forms (-as, -is, -os, -us, -u) count under the infinitive in -i, and forms such as min and miajn count under mi and mia. Words derived with affixes stay separate: bona, bone and malbona are three entries.
4. Real words only. A form counts only if its dictionary form is in the headword lists of ESPDIC, the Reta Vortaro or Wiktionary, or if our word-building analyser can split it into known roots and affixes.
5. Names left out. Words written with a capital letter inside a sentence more often than with a small letter (Maria, Bostono, Japanio) were removed as names. Four ordinary words that are capitalised by custom stay: Esperanto, Dio "God", Kristnasko "Christmas" and Interreto "the Internet".
6. At least 30 contributors. A word must occur in sentences by at least 30 different contributors. This removes words that one person repeats in template sentences: 478 of the 511 sentences containing a form of kaleŝo "carriage" come from a single contributor.
7. Ranking. Words are ranked by the number of times they occur. per_million is that number divided by 5,831,657 and multiplied by one million.
8. Meanings. The English meanings come from the English Wiktionary and ESPDIC, shortened and edited by us; the meanings of grammar words are our own.

#Limits of this list

• Tatoeba is a corpus of sentences, not of spoken Esperanto. The sentences are written, short and mostly about everyday life, and many are translations. Novels, news and speech would give a different order.
• A few contributors wrote much of it. The three most active contributors wrote 44.9% of the sentences. The 30-contributor rule limits their influence on single words but does not remove it.
• Meanings are short glosses, not definitions. Many words have several senses; use the dictionary for the full picture.
• Each form is a separate word. bono "good thing", bona "good" and bone "well" are three entries. Counting roots would give a shorter list.
• Names and numbers are not covered. Names are left out, and digits are not words in this count.

#Common questions

#How many words do I need in Esperanto?

The first 500 words cover 72.2% of the words in everyday Esperanto sentences, 1,000 words cover 78.4% and 2,000 words cover 84.0%. Because Esperanto builds many words from roots and affixes, you can understand more words than you have memorised. See word building.

#How many words are in Esperanto?

There is no official count, because speakers can form new words from roots and affixes. The ESPDIC dictionary lists 63,895 entries (file of 6 October 2024). The Reta Vortaro had 13,094 articles with 32,762 derived words on 7 October 2026. The Tatoeba corpus used here contains 157,389 different word forms, before they are reduced to dictionary forms.

#Is there an Esperanto word list as PDF or CSV?

Yes, as CSV and as an Anki file: CSV and Anki with 1,000 words, meanings and frequencies. We do not offer a PDF. The CSV opens in any spreadsheet program, and you can print from there.

#What are the most common Esperanto words?

The ten most common are la "the", mi "I", esti "to be", vi "you", ne "no, not", li "he", de "of, from", al "to", en "in" and ke "that". Together they make up 26.9% of all words in the corpus.

#Which Esperanto words should I learn first?

Start with the grammar words in the first 100: pronouns, the article, prepositions, conjunctions and correlatives. Grammar words make up 44.4% of all words in the corpus. Then add the most common verbs and nouns from the tables above. The Basic phrases page shows common words in short everyday phrases.

#Sources

• Tatoeba: downloads – file epo_sentences_detailed.tsv.bz2, exported per language, downloaded 7 October 2026
• Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 France (Tatoeba sentences)
• Wiktionary: Esperanto lemmas (CC BY-SA 4.0)
• Kaikki.org: Esperanto dictionary from Wiktionary data
• ESPDIC: Esperanto-English dictionary by Paul Denisowski (CC BY 3.0)
• Reta Vortaro: statistics
• Wiktionary: Frequency lists/Esperanto/Tekstaro 2023
• Anki manual: importing text files
• Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0