Word Frequency List for English

This page lists the 2000 most frequent English words, according to the BNC data base. Numbers, abbreviations, contractions, and place names have been excluded. The list is lemmatized, meaning the base form (infinitive or singular) is counted by the frequency of all its derived forms. A text version is also available.

Note that sometimes, two principle entries cannot be separated because they share forms, e.g. 'to live' and 'the life' both have a derived form 'lives'. These words had to be combined into one single entry in the list.

The list also unifies undisputed synonyms into one entry (e.g. small=little, usually=normally, etc.). Words which share synonym readings but are different in some other meanings have been left separated.