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Fortunately, you don’t have to learn them all to become fluent in English. Americans use around 2500 – 3000 of the most common words in their daily lives. If you know these 3000 most common words, you can understand at least 95% of all conversations, e-mails, newspapers, and books.

Sounds great! But what is the most effective way to learn these words?

Focus on example sentences when learning vocabulary. Here’s why?

When it comes to learning English vocabulary, the most important thing
you need to focus on are
example sentences because they help you to improve all your English skills — including vocabulary, listening, speaking, and writing.

If you want to speak English fluently, learn with your ears, not with your eyes

Learning English can be broken down into two parts: input and output.  Input consists of reading and listening while output consists of writing and speaking. The more input you get, the more output you can produce. It’s that simple.

Here’s the little secret you probably don’t know yet:

Repetition is the secret to English fluency

If you want to quickly achieve fluency level — to speak English easily, fluently and automatically, you’ll need to do one more thing:

Learn deeply through lots of repetition. 

It means that you will need to listen to every example sentence many, many times, until you MASTER it. Don’t listen just one time or a few times. It’s not enough. You will forget it very soon.

You may know how to use a word to make a correct sentence, but here’s the thing: Can you use it quickly, easily, and automatically? 

If the answer is no, you need to repeat more. You must listen to that example sentence again and again. 

Don’t ignore this simple secret. This is how you will achieve automatically fast speaking.

FREE English Lessons — 3000 Most Frequently Used Words in English

In the following section, you will find around 3000 free lessons for the 3000 most commonly used words in English. Each lesson consists of the definition (meaning) of the word, the audio pronunciation, and many example sentences with high-quality audio.

Listen to (and repeat) each lesson many times — and watch how fast your English speaking improves!

Enjoy the lessons!

P/S: Check out the Resources page for our recommended courses and lessons.

The words we’ve compiled here probably look familiar: they are the 100 most frequently written words in the English language. Many of the most frequently used words in English are important, fundamental parts of speech like articles, conjunctions, and prepositions.

If those terms sound like gobbledygook to you, or you haven’t heard them since third grade English class, we understand. So we’re going to give you a rundown of these frequently-used words and break down their parts of speech along the way. As an added bonus, we have some helpful suggestions for more interesting synonyms (or words with similar meanings) that you might want to try instead.

Note: this list doesn’t include multiple forms of the same word. For example, we have only included do, not does, doing, and did. Also, each of these words may have multiple meanings. We have listed them here by their most common part of speech. For example, the word this can be a pronoun, adjective, or adverb, depending on the context, but we have it listed under pronoun because that’s one of its most common uses.

Ready? Let’s go!

Most-used articles

An article denotes whether a noun is specific or unspecific. There are three articles in English, and they are some of the most frequently used words:

• the
• a
• an

Most-used verbs

A verb is a word that describes an action, state, or a relation between two things.

To be or not to be?

The verb to be and its various forms (is, am, were, etc.) is used constantly in writing and speech. It’s an important verb, to be sure (we just used it again), but be mindful of how often it pops up in your writing. Try substituting one of these alternatives:

• continue
• hold
• remain
• occur
• transpire

Helper (auxiliary) verbs

These overused verbs are used to create verb forms that indicate time or mood and are not usually found on their own.

• may
• can
• will

Action verbs

These frequently used verbs describe movements and actions. And these verbs, like to be, have a tendency to get overused. When you’re writing, instead of repeating these same verbs, mix it up with some of the synonyms we have suggested after each below:

• do: accomplish, prepare, resolve, work out
• say: suggest, disclose, answer
• go: continue, move, lead
• get: bring, attain, catch, become
• make: create, cause, prepare, invest
• know: understand, appreciate, experience, identify
• think: contemplate, remember, judge, consider
• take: accept, steal, buy, endure
• see: detect, comprehend, scan
• come: happen, appear, extend, occur
• want: choose, prefer, require, wish
• look: glance, notice, peer, read
• use: accept, apply, handle, work
• find: detect, discover, notice, uncover
• give: grant, award, issue
• tell: confess, explain, inform, reveal

Most-used adverbs

An adverb is a word that modifies verbs, clauses, adjectives, and other adverbs. For example, in the sentence I drove quickly, the word quickly is an adverb modifying the verb drove. The most common adverbs are:

• when
• now
• how
• also
• not
• as
• up
• here
• there
• so
• very

Instead of these typical adverbs, why not choose some of these more colorful alternatives?

• immediately
• initially
• additionally
• nearby
• extremely
• greatly

Most-used nouns

A noun is a word that describes a person, place, or thing. There are surprisingly few nouns in the top 100 most frequently written words in the English language. However, the nouns we do use most describe things that are fundamental:

• time
• year
• people
• day
• man
• thing
• woman
• work
• child
• life
• world
• way
• back

The thing about “thing”…

One of the most common nouns is thing. When you’re writing, you should try to avoid this word as much as possible! Nine times out of 10, thing can be replaced with a more accurate and precise description. For instance, instead of writing “We weren’t able to find the thing,” write, “We weren’t able to find the million-dollar treasure.” It is more clear, interesting, and compelling.

Most-used pronouns

A pronoun is a word that replaces a noun. We use pronouns to avoid repeating the same nouns.

• I
• you
• your
• he
• she
• them
• their
• her
• him
• me
• my
• it
• its
• our
• these
• this
• that
• those
• who
• what
• which

Most-used adjectives

An adjective is a word that modifies, or describes, a noun or pronoun.

Is “good” really good enough?

One of the most frequently used adjectives is good. We think good is, well, not that good of a word. It’s boring! Instead of this common word, try one of these more illustrative synonyms next time:

• acceptable
• competent
• satisfying
• efficient
• adept
• honest
• sound

Other frequently used adjectives are not as easily replaced. Makes sense why they are used all the time then, right?

• all
• just
• even
• first
• many
• one
• two
• some
• like
• other
• more
• new
• any
• down

Most-used conjunctions

A conjunction is a word that links words, phrases, clauses, or sentences. These little words do important work, which helps explain why we rely on them so much.

Here are the most-used conjunctions:

• and
• or
• if
• because
• but
• than

Most-used prepositions

A preposition is a word that links one phrase to a phrase that is modifying or describing, it. Often it is used to describe the spatial or temporal relationships between things: in The book is on the table, the preposition on describes where the book is.

Here are some common prepositions:

• of
• in
• to
• for
• with
• on
• by
• out
• into
• about

There are around 150 prepositions or prepositional phrases in the English language. And many of them don’t get much use. Some prepositions you might want to try to spice up your writing are:

• atop
• astride
• notwithstanding
• vis-à-vis
• pursuant to
• based on
• by virtue of

When writing, keep this list in mind. Some words you can’t necessarily avoid—like prepositions and conjunctions—but, when it comes to verbs or adjectives, try to think outside of the box and pick words that might not get their time in the spotlight.

It will make your work more interesting to read—and build your vocabulary, too!

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Studies that estimate and rank the most common words in English examine texts written in English. Perhaps the most comprehensive such analysis is one that was conducted against the Oxford English Corpus (OEC), a massive text corpus that is written in the English language.

In total, the texts in the Oxford English Corpus contain more than 2 billion words.^[1] The OEC includes a wide variety of writing samples, such as literary works, novels, academic journals, newspapers, magazines, Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, blogs, chat logs, and emails.^[2]

Another English corpus that has been used to study word frequency is the Brown Corpus, which was compiled by researchers at Brown University in the 1960s. The researchers published their analysis of the Brown Corpus in 1967. Their findings were similar, but not identical, to the findings of the OEC analysis.

According to The Reading Teacher’s Book of Lists, the first 25 words in the OEC make up about one-third of all printed material in English, and the first 100 words make up about half of all written English.^[3] According to a study cited by Robert McCrum in The Story of English, all of the first hundred of the most common words in English are of Old English origin,^[4] except for «people», ultimately from Latin «populus», and «because», in part from Latin «causa».

Some lists of common words distinguish between word forms, while others rank all forms of a word as a single lexeme (the form of the word as it would appear in a dictionary). For example, the lexeme be (as in to be) comprises all its conjugations (is, was, am, are, were, etc.), and contractions of those conjugations.^[5] These top 100 lemmas listed below account for 50% of all the words in the Oxford English Corpus.^[1]

100 most common words

A list of 100 words that occur most frequently in written English is given below, based on an analysis of the Oxford English Corpus (a collection of texts in the English language, comprising over 2 billion words).^[1] A part of speech is provided for most of the words, but part-of-speech categories vary between analyses, and not all possibilities are listed. For example, «I» may be a pronoun or a Roman numeral; «to» may be a preposition or an infinitive marker; «time» may be a noun or a verb. Also, a single spelling can represent more than one root word. For example, «singer» may be a form of either «sing» or «singe». Different corpora may treat such difference differently.

The number of distinct senses that are listed in Wiktionary is shown in the polysemy column. For example, «out» can refer to an escape, a removal from play in baseball, or any of 36 other concepts. On average, each word in the list has 15.38 senses. The sense count does not include the use of terms in phrasal verbs such as «put out» (as in «inconvenienced») and other multiword expressions such as the interjection «get out!», where the word «out» does not have an individual meaning.^[6] As an example, «out» occurs in at least 560 phrasal verbs^[7] and appears in nearly 1700 multiword expressions.^[8]

The table also includes frequencies from other corpora. Note that as well as usage differences, lemmatisation may differ from corpus to corpus – for example splitting the prepositional use of «to» from the use as a particle. Also the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) list includes dispersion as well as frequency to calculate rank.

Parts of speech

The following is a very similar list, subdivided by part of speech.^[1] The list labeled «Others» includes pronouns, possessives, articles, modal verbs, adverbs, and conjunctions.

See also

• Basic English
• Frequency analysis, the study of the frequency of letters or groups of letters
• Letter frequencies
• Oxford English Corpus
• Swadesh list, a compilation of basic concepts for the purpose of historical-comparative linguistics
• Zipf’s law, a theory stating that the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in a frequency table

Word lists

• Dolch Word List, a list of frequently used English words
• General Service List
• Word lists by frequency

References

External links

3,000 Core Vocabulary Words

Our editors have identified 3,000 English words that are most important to know. Study this list to improve your vocabulary.

Featured topics

• 100 Essential Words for the TOEFL: 100 must-have words to study for the TOEFL test
• Sports: Words for popular American sports
• Air Travel: Useful words for traveling on airplanes and through airports
• The Environment: Vocabulary related to environmental science and climate change
• Family members: Relatives and other important people
• Jobs/Professions: Types of jobs and careers
• Legal English: Vocabulary for court trials and other legal proceedings
• Words for emotions: Different feelings that people have
• Parts of the Body : External parts of the human body
• Noncount nouns: Nouns that cannot be counted or be plural
• Time adverbs: Words that tell when and how often
• Health: Words for common medical problems
• Personality types: Adjectives that describe behavior and personality
• Periods of time: Long and short amounts of time
• Employment: Words for work in a company
• Academic writing: About the structure and content of academic writing
• College and university life: Vocabulary for college and university students
• Economics: Concepts in economics
• Weather: Terms that describe weather conditions

Browse the full list alphabetically