The 1000 most common Spanish words

Every word form on the list Apera ranks its reading by, down to number 1000, with what each one means in English.

66%of the words on an ordinary Spanish page

Download the spreadsheet

1,000 rows. Rank, the word, its dictionary form and what it means.

Or the plain list

The 1,000 words on their own, one per line, for pasting somewhere else.

Yours to reuse, including commercially, if you credit the sources named at the foot of this page and share anything you build from it under the same terms (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The first 20 of 1,000
RankWordMeaning
1deof/from
2quethat/which
3nono/not
4ato/at
5lathe
6elthe
7yand
8esis
9enin
10loit/the
RankWordMeaning
11una/an
12porfor/by
13quéwhat
14meme
15unaa/an
16losthe
17sehimself/herself/oneself
18teyou
19conwith
20parafor
The ranking

Number one is the word you meet most

The order is how often every Spanish 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 Spanish 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.

In the file

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 Spanish 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 Spanish text checker.

In the app

The same ranking, about 17 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 17 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.

You have the thousand. Which of them you already know is the part that decides what you can read next, and it is the one thing a file cannot say.

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Ordered by word counts Hermit Dave published (FrequencyWords, CC BY-SA 3.0), which he counted from the OpenSubtitles collection distributed by the OPUS project under ODC-BY.