What Is a Frequency Dictionary? Learn the Most Common Words First

A frequency dictionary is a list of a language's words ranked by how often people actually use them, from the most common down. Learning in that order pays off fast: in English, the 1,000 most frequent words make up about 85% of speech. That's why a frequency dictionary is the smartest place to start building your vocabulary.

"I don't know that word." "What does it mean?" "How do I use it?" Every language learner asks these questions, and for good reason. Not knowing enough words, or the right ones, is the root of most misunderstandings, and of trouble reading and writing, too.

The challenge is that every language has an enormous number of words. The Oxford English Dictionary alone covers about 600,000 English words. Nobody learns them all, so the real question is which words to learn first. A frequency dictionary answers it.

What is a frequency dictionary?

A frequency dictionary is a list of the words that appear most often in a language's written or spoken texts. Linguists build it by counting words in a large collection of real texts, called a corpus.

The list can be sorted in several ways:

• by frequency, from the most common word down;
• in groups, for example the first thousand most frequent words, then the second thousand;
• alphabetically;
• by typicality, meaning words that are common across most kinds of texts.

Frequency lists are used for learning and teaching languages, for writing new dictionaries and in computational linguistics. For a learner, though, they have one big job: to show you which words deserve your attention first.

Why should you learn the most frequent words first?

Because a small set of words does most of the work in any language. Linguists call this pattern Zipf's law: the most common word appears about twice as often as the second most common, three times as often as the third, and so on down the list.

For English, vocabulary researcher Paul Nation showed in 1990 that the 1,000 most frequent words account for about 85% of speech, and the 4,000-5,000 most frequent words account for up to 95% of a written text. His numbers are for English, but Zipf's law holds in many languages, so the same idea works for them too.

So learning words in order of frequency gives you the fastest return. Every word near the top of the list is one you'll hear and read again and again. If Spanish is your language, a good first deck is The 100 Most Common Spanish Words with Pronunciation.

Two honest caveats. First, counting words is harder than it looks: is "run" in "a morning run" the same word as in "run a company"? Second, a frequency list should never be your only guide. It's an excellent starting point, but you also need words for your own interests, work and daily life.

How many words do you need to know to be fluent?

In my experience, you need about 10,000 words to communicate fully in a foreign language. Research points in the same direction: in a 2006 study, Paul Nation estimated that to understand about 98% of the words in a text, you need 6,000-7,000 word families for spoken English and 8,000-9,000 for written English. A word family is a base word with its forms, such as "use", "used" and "useful".

The order matters as much as the number. If you learn 10,000 random words, you'll understand real speech much worse than someone who learned the 10,000 most frequent ones. That's why I always recommend starting with a frequency dictionary, whether you learn English online or any other language. I describe how this fits into a daily routine in my guide on how to learn English fast.

How are Lingocard frequency dictionaries made?

Lingocard frequency dictionaries are compiled with special algorithms that analyze how often words are used in the most popular books of world literature. So the words at the top of each list are the ones you'll actually meet when you read and listen.

Each dictionary is split into manageable blocks. In the web app, for example, the Spanish frequency dictionary starts with the first 500 basic words, then 500 to 1,000, and so on in blocks of 500 words up to 5,000, followed by a block from 5,000 to 10,000. Next to them, you'll find decks of basic sentences for beginner and intermediate levels.

Why learn basic sentences along with a frequency list?

Words alone won't make you fluent. You've probably noticed that people speaking a foreign language often pause mid-sentence while they search for the next word, and those pauses make conversation hard for both sides.

That's why I recommend learning whole basic sentences, or sentences on topics you need, together with your frequency dictionary. Memorized sentences give you ready-made patterns and word combinations. Combined with the most frequent words, they let you say entire sentences quickly, without stopping to think about word order.

How to memorize a frequency dictionary without spending hours

Best for: anyone who has downloaded a big word list and wonders how to get through it.

Once you have your frequency dictionary, the real challenge begins: memorizing a large number of new words when you don't have much free time. These tools make it manageable:

• Spaced repetition. Lingocard's spaced repetition system brings each word back just before you're likely to forget it, so you spend time only on words that need it.
• An audio player for busy days. The audio player in the Lingocard mobile app reads your words and sentences aloud, so you can study while driving or walking. Mark the words you've learned, and you'll only hear the new and difficult ones.
• Your own pictures. The ready-made dictionaries load a huge number of words and sentences, so they come without pictures to save space on your phone. But you can add any picture to a hard word yourself. A picture you chose creates an extra association, and that makes the word easier to recall.
• Both directions. It's valuable to translate quickly both ways, from the foreign language to your native one and back. In the app settings, you can choose which side of the card you see first.
• Regular check-ups. Mark the cards you've studied, and you can open that list on any device to test yourself and track your progress.

For more techniques, see our guide to language flashcards and these 7 ways to improve your vocabulary.

Where can you get free frequency dictionaries?

Lingocard has frequency dictionaries for any combination of 67 languages. The basic ones are free as soon as you sign up, and they come with audio and spaced repetition in our free flashcards app.

You can also create your own learning material. On a computer, the Flashcards Manager in the web app, included with Premium, turns any text file or word list into a deck of cards. All your cards are stored in your cloud account, so they sync across your devices.

My advice is simple: start with the most frequent words, learn basic sentences alongside them, and review a little every day. You'll understand real speech sooner than you think. Everything you need for that is on the Lingocard language learning platform.