01
Frequency, not chapters
The first 1,000 words cover 72.6% of film dialogue and 63.8% of English averaged across speech, news and reference writing. You meet them first, in the order they actually occur.
English vocabulary, by frequency
The most common English words, ranked by real use
Ranked from three corpora — film dialogue, journalism and encyclopedic prose — so the order reflects the whole language rather than one genre. Every word carries its pronunciation.
02
Three corpora, not one
A single corpus is a genre. Subtitles alone teach you to follow a film and leave you lost in a newspaper; the blend fixes that.
03
Pronunciation on every word
English spelling does not predict sound, so every transcription comes from CMUdict rather than from a rule — all 5,000. Parts of speech, levels, examples and meanings are written by hand, for all 5,000.
Browse the list by rank
The list runs in frequency order, a hundred words to a page. Start at the top, or jump to the stretch you are working on.
Questions the list answers
Two pieces built from the same counts as the ranking: what the first thousand words really cover, and how many you need.
If 5,000 is too many to start with
A frequency list is the wrong first thing to meet if you are at the very beginning. The first hundred words and the A1 band are set out word by word, with audio, on our beginner site.
Hear the words in real English
LingoTello is an app for reading and listening to English texts from A1 to C2, spoken by native voices. Tap a word and its meaning appears in your language while the audio keeps playing. It is opening through a waitlist, on Android first.
Find out where you are
Forty to fifty words, four meanings each, and an estimate of how many of the 5,000 you already know — kept in your browser rather than ours.
Words 1–6 of 5,000
001
the
pointing to something already known or unique
A1
002
to
toward a place; or marking a verb base form
A1
003
and
joining two words, phrases or clauses
A1
004
of
belonging to, or made from
A1
005
a
one, not yet identified
A1
006
in
inside something, or within a period
A1