The 1000 most common German words

Number one is the word you meet most

The order is how often every German word turns up across a very large body of real dialogue, most common first. A word's rank is just its place in that order. The one at the top appears more often than any other German word; the one at number 1000 is the thousandth most common.

Ranks use published subtitle word counts. See the source credit for details.

Each row is a word as you actually meet it, not a dictionary entry. Each form has its own frequency rank.

Four columns, a thousand rows

Every row is one word form: its rank, the word, the dictionary form it belongs to, and what it means in English. The plain list is the same thousand words with all of that stripped away, one per line.

Names, foreign words and fragments are filtered out before ranking, so what you get is a thousand German words rather than a thousand strings. Each meaning is written for that form in particular.

To see how much of a particular text these cover, paste it into the German text checker.

The same ranking, about 16 times longer

This one stops at a thousand because a thousand is the size you can read through, import somewhere, or work down. The list Apera reads by carries on roughly 16 times further — it does not stop being useful, it stops being a file anyone would open.

It also holds more per word. In the app a word can be shown with the meaning it had in the sentence you met it in, next to its general one; a file has room for a single meaning per row.