The 100 Most Common English Words (and Why They Matter)
By Mir Hadi ·
About half of all written English comes from a list of roughly a hundred words. That is the figure usually quoted (it goes back to The Reading Teacher’s Book of Lists), and Wikipedia’s page on the most common English words gives it next to a ranking from the two-billion-word Oxford English Corpus. Learn those and you can follow the shape of almost any sentence; the rest is vocabulary you pick up one topic at a time.
Here are the hundred most frequent words in our data, which ranks every word in the dictionary by how often it appears in real English text.
The list
1 to 25: the, to, and, of, in, is, for, that, you, it, on, with, was, this, be, as, are, have, at, he, not, by, but, from, my
26 to 50: or, we, an, your, so, all, his, they, me, if, one, can, will, just, like, about, up, out, what, has, when, more, do, no, who
51 to 75: were, had, their, there, her, which, time, get, been, would, she, new, people, how, some, also, them, now, other, its, our, than, good, only, him
76 to 100: into, after, first, see, two, know, make, over, think, any, then, could, us, back, want, these, go, well, because, way, said, most, much, very, where
What’s in it
Almost nothing on the list is a “thing”. There are three nouns in the top hundred (time, people, way).
Verbs are more numerous, 22 of them, but most are doing grammar rather than describing an action. Six are forms of be (be, is, are, was, were, been), three are forms of have (have, has, had), one is do, and four are the modals can, will, would and could, which carry tense and mood. That leaves eight verbs with an ordinary meaning of their own: get, go, know, make, see, think, want and said. Like could be a 23rd, though it is also a preposition (“like this”), so it sits on the fence.
Everything else is structure: articles (the, an; a and I are missing only because our dictionary starts at two letters), pronouns (you, it, they), prepositions (of, in, to, with) and conjunctions (and, but, because).
That’s why the list is so useful to a learner. These words don’t carry meaning on their own; they tell you how the meaningful words relate to each other. Once they’re automatic, reading speed jumps, because your attention is free for the words that are actually new.
How to learn them
Don’t learn them as a list. Read something easy and notice how often the, of and to turn up, and repetition will do the memorising for you.
It does help to learn the confusable pairs side by side (would and could, this and these, there and their), because that’s where most of the mistakes happen. Our list of 30 commonly confused words has a quick test for each. And spell the irregular ones on purpose: because, people, their and which are common words with uncommon spellings, and each is worth five minutes of attention.
Where the ranking comes from
We rank words by frequency in a large corpus of modern English, the open wordfreq dataset, filtered to words that appear in standard dictionaries. Its author describes the data as a snapshot of language use up to about 2021, so words that took off after that are under-counted. The same ranking decides which words come first in our word finder results and which words can be answers in Wordle Unlimited. The full ranking continues past these hundred to about 168,000 words.