english5000 is an independent project that ranks the 5,000 most common English words from three corpora and shows its working. It is free, carries no ads and needs no account.
A ranked list of the 5,000 commonest English words with the pronunciation of every one; a part of speech, a level, an example sentence and a meaning in six languages for the first 1,000 and a sample beyond them, 5,000 words in all, written by hand; and a seven-minute vocabulary test that estimates how many of the list you already know.
Three corpora — film and television subtitles, news and Wikipedia — are converted to rates per million words and blended with a geometric mean, so a word has to be common across registers rather than in one. Proper nouns and web debris are filtered out. Every step is on the method page.
Figures on this site are measured from the corpora, not repeated from elsewhere, and corrected in public when they turn out wrong: in September 2026 we found that our coverage figures had counted punctuation as words, and fixed every one of them. Unfinished work is labelled as unfinished. There are no ads, no accounts and no cookies.
english5000 is one of three sites built the same way. One ranks Spanish by the same method; the other covers the very beginning of English, before a 5,000-word list is any use.
The same ranking, for SpanishStarting out? The first 100 English words
Corrections, missing words, questions about the data — all welcome.