WordieWhat Are High-Frequency Words?
High-Frequency Words: The most common words of a language, usually defined as the first 2,000 to 3,000 word families, which together make up the large majority of the words in everyday speech and writing.
Also known as: common words, core vocabulary, general service vocabulary
High-frequency words are the relatively small set of words that make up most of what people say and write. Words like the, be, have, go, time, people, know and good appear on almost every page of almost every text. Learn the first 1,000 or so word families and you will recognize roughly four out of every five words in a typical English text. That is why vocabulary researchers almost universally recommend starting here.
How much text do common words cover?
Word frequency follows a steep curve described by Zipf's law: a handful of words are extremely common, and the rest drop off fast. Approximate figures from studies by Paul Nation and others:
| Most frequent word families | Approximate coverage of typical text |
|---|---|
| first 100 | about half of all running words |
| first 1,000 | around 80% (more in conversation) |
| first 2,000 | mid-to-high 80s % |
| first 3,000 | around 90% |
| 8,000–9,000 | about 98% of written text (Nation, 2006) |
Exact figures depend on the text type, whether proper nouns are counted, and whether words are counted as word families or lemmas. Fiction and conversation are covered by common words more easily than academic or technical writing. You can see this for any text with the lexical coverage calculator or the word frequency counter.
Examples of high-frequency words
- Function words: the, of, and, a, to, in, that, it, for, on, with, as, but, not
- Common verbs: be, have, do, say, get, make, go, know, take, see, come, think, look, want, give, use, find, tell
- Common nouns: time, year, people, way, day, man, thing, woman, life, child, world, school
- Common adjectives: good, new, first, last, long, great, little, own, other, old, right, big, high
The top of the list is dominated by grammatical words. The alone accounts for roughly 5 to 7 percent of all running words in typical English corpora.
Classic high-frequency word lists
- General Service List (West, 1953): about 2,000 headwords chosen for frequency and usefulness. Old, but it shaped decades of teaching and graded readers.
- New General Service List (Browne, Culligan and Phillips, 2013): an updated corpus-based list of about 2,800 lemmas.
- Dolch and Fry sight words: short lists for young native-speaker readers, not designed for second-language learners.
Above the high-frequency band, specialist lists take over, such as the Academic Word List for university reading.
Why high-frequency words matter for learners
Every high-frequency word you learn pays off immediately, because you will meet it again within minutes of reading. A rare word like obsequious may not reappear for months. Schmitt and Schmitt (2014) proposed treating the first 3,000 families as high-frequency, the next 6,000 as mid-frequency and everything beyond 9,000 as low-frequency. Their argument: the high-frequency band deserves explicit, deliberate study, while mid-frequency words are mostly gained through extensive reading.
There is a catch. "Knowing" high-frequency words is harder than it looks, because they are the most polysemous words in English and combine into countless phrasal verbs and collocations. A learner may know get means "receive" but not get on with someone, get it (understand) or get to (be allowed to).
How to use frequency in your study
- Beginners: learn the first 2,000–3,000 word families deliberately, with flashcards and graded readers.
- Intermediate learners: go deeper on the common words you already "know": extra senses, phrasal verbs and collocations.
- Advanced learners: stop studying general lists. Save the words you actually meet in your own reading. Wordie is built for this stage: you look up and save the unfamiliar words on the pages you read, and the ones that recur get highlighted again and again.
Common mistakes
- Skipping the basics to learn impressive words. Rare words won't help much if common ones still cause problems.
- Learning one meaning per word. Common words need more senses, not fewer.
- Studying frequency lists forever. Past about 3,000 families, your own reading is a better guide than any general list.
Sources: West, M. (1953), A General Service List of English Words; Nation, P. (2006), How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening?, Canadian Modern Language Review; Schmitt, N. & Schmitt, D. (2014), A reassessment of frequency and vocabulary size in L2 vocabulary teaching, Language Teaching; Browne, C., Culligan, B. & Phillips, J. (2013), New General Service List.
Frequently asked questions
How many high-frequency words are there?
There is no fixed number. Traditionally the first 2,000 word families (as in West's General Service List) were called high-frequency; Schmitt and Schmitt (2014) argued the band should be the first 3,000 families.
What percentage of text do high-frequency words cover?
The most frequent 1,000 word families usually cover around 80 percent of the running words in ordinary written English and somewhat more of conversation. The first 2,000 to 3,000 families push that close to 90 percent.
Are high-frequency words the same as sight words?
Not exactly. Sight word lists such as Dolch and Fry are for children learning to read and focus on the very most common words they should recognize instantly. High-frequency vocabulary in language learning is a larger set of word families.
Should learners study high-frequency words first?
Yes. Because they appear so often, each one you learn has a big payoff in comprehension. Beyond the first few thousand, it makes sense to focus on the words that are frequent in your own field or reading.
Related terms
Zipf's Law
The observation that in a large body of text, a word's frequency is roughly inversely proportional to its frequency rank, so the second most common word occurs about half as often as the first and the third about a third as often.
Lexical Coverage
The percentage of the running words (tokens) in a text that a particular reader knows. At 98 percent coverage, about one word in fifty is unfamiliar.
Vocabulary Size
The number of words a person knows, usually measured in word families or lemmas and usually referring to receptive knowledge, meaning words recognized when reading or listening.
Academic Word List (AWL)
A list of 570 word families, compiled by Averil Coxhead (2000), that occur frequently across academic texts in many subjects but are not among the most common general English words.
Word Family
A base word together with its inflected forms and its common derived forms, treated as one unit when counting vocabulary, for example develop, develops, developed, developing, development and undeveloped.
Articles about High-Frequency Words
Why Flashcards Alone Fail: The Limits of Word–Definition Learning and How to Fix Them
Flashcards build the word–meaning link fast but miss collocation, register and usage. Why flashcards alone fail, and how context and reading fix the gaps.
Academic Vocabulary for Non-Native Researchers: Read Papers Faster and Write With Confidence
A practical academic vocabulary system for non-native researchers: general academic words, hedging language, discipline terms and a weekly paper-reading plan.
Business English Vocabulary for Non-Native Professionals: Meetings, Email and Sounding Natural
Business English vocabulary for non-native professionals: meeting and email phrases, industry jargon, collocations and a weekly plan to sound natural at work.
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