Wikipedia:Word frequency

This list contains the most common words in English. It favors words that students and second language learners are more likely to know and encounter in easier content. The closer to the top a word is, the more likely it is readers will know it. It is hoped that this list will help editors design articles suited for children and second-language learners of English.

This list is different from other word frequency lists. Most lists are built using content made for adults and at an adult level of English. This list instead favors content at an easier level of English, such as children's books, children's magazines, family and animated movies (such as Disney movies), easier fiction books, and others. Because of this, it is closer to a collection of known words by Simple English speakers. The closer to the top a word is, the more likely it is readers will know it.

The data comes from custom inquiries on COCA, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which is the largest and best balanced corpus (word database) of modern English. Different forms of the same word are combined into what are called lemmas.

The levels (e.g. A1, B2) correspond with words likely to be known at different CEFR levels. If a word is not listed on this page, it is beyond C1 (advanced) level and is unlikely to be known by most readers of Simple Wikipedia.