The 100 most common Esperanto words

The 100 most common Esperanto words make up 52.7% of all words in the Tekstaro, a corpus of more than 10 million words. Most of them are short grammar words – la "the", de "of", kaj "and" – plus a few frequent verbs, nouns and adjectives. The table below lists all 100 in order of frequency, with an English translation and the type of word.

#How the list was made

The ranking comes from a frequency list of the Tekstaro de Esperanto, the corpus of the Esperantic Studies Foundation, built since 2002 by Bertilo Wennergren. The list was compiled from a copy of the corpus dated 15 March 2023 and published on Wiktionary under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. Each word is counted in its base form: plural -j and accusative -n are removed, and all verb forms are counted under the infinitive in -i. So estas, estis and estos all count as esti "to be".

The translations and word types are ours. Many grammar words have several uses; the table gives the main ones.

#The list

#What the list tells you

Grammar words dominate. About two thirds of the list are grammar words: prepositions, pronouns, possessives, conjunctions, particles, correlatives, numbers and the article. These closed groups are small: Esperanto has 33 prepositions and 45 correlatives in total. Learning them early pays off fast. See prepositions, pronouns and correlatives.

The first content words are basic. The most common verbs are esti, povi, diri, havi, fari, devi, vidi, voli, scii, veni and okazi. The most common nouns are jaro, homo, lingvo and lando.

Coverage grows slowly after the first few hundred words. In the same list, 500 words cover 68.8% of the corpus, 1,000 words 76.2%, 2,000 words 83.5% and 10,000 words 96.1%.

52.7%

59.6%

68.8%

76.2%

83.5%

91.7%

96.1%

1002005001,0002,0005,00010,000

Show the data

Most common words	Share of the corpus
100	52.7%
200	59.6%
500	68.8%
1,000	76.2%
2,000	83.5%
5,000	91.7%
10,000	96.1%

Word building multiplies what you know. One root gives many words: san- gives sana "healthy", malsana "ill", malsanulo "patient" and malsanulejo "hospital". A list of roots therefore teaches more than the same number of English words. See word building.

#Limits of this list

The Tekstaro is written language only: Zamenhof's works (including his Bible translation), other classics and more recent texts. That explains words such as internacia in the top 100, and s-ro (abbreviation of sinjoro "Mr"), UEA and Eternulo "the Eternal" in the second hundred. Everyday conversation words sit far down the list: danki "to thank" is number 1,041 and saluto "greeting" (as in Saluton!) number 1,870. For spoken phrases, see Basic Esperanto phrases. For a longer list built from everyday sentences, with CSV and Anki downloads, see 1000 most common Esperanto words.

Two other references are useful. The Academy of Esperanto's Baza Radikaro Oficiala (1974) sorts about 2,500 basic elements, mostly roots, into nine groups by comparing earlier frequency lists. The Zagreb method, developed in Zagreb from the late 1970s, builds its beginner course around roughly 500 of the most frequent morphemes (roots and affixes).

#Common questions

#What is the most common word in Esperanto?

The article la "the". It is followed by de "of", kaj "and", en "in" and esti "to be".

#How many words do I need to speak Esperanto?

Beginner courses based on the Zagreb method teach about 500 frequent morphemes (roots and affixes) for simple conversations. Because roots and affixes combine, they give you far more than 500 words.

#How many words does Esperanto have?

Thousands of roots, and an open number of words built from them. The Academy's official dictionary lists about 5,000 elements, and the Wiktionary frequency list alone ranks 15,000 word forms.

#Where can I download an Esperanto frequency list?

The Tekstaro list is on Wiktionary, and a version that is easier to process, with English translations, is on GitHub (Vanege). Both are under CC BY-SA 4.0.

#Sources

• Wiktionary: Frequency lists/Esperanto/Tekstaro 2023 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
• Vanege: esperanto-frequency-list-tekstaro (GitHub)
• Tekstaro de Esperanto: project description
• Akademio de Esperanto: Baza Radikaro Oficiala
• Akademio de Esperanto: Akademia Vortaro – explanations
• PMEG: Rolvortetoj (prepositions)
• Wikipedia: Esperanto – The Zagreb method