All 5,000 most common French words

Sources and licences

The ranking is ours, built from the frequency data below and published under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Two things worth knowing before you read it. The list holds content words - nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs - so the function words that top any raw frequency count are not in it: no le, de, et, and no pronouns. And each entry gives one everyday meaning, written to be the one you are most likely to need, not the word's full range of senses.

To cite this resource: linguafolks. The most common French words. www.linguafolks.com/articles/most-common-words/fr. Teachers and institutions are welcome to use, print or adapt the lists in coursework with attribution and a link.

• Lexique 3.83

  French lemma frequency, separated by part of speech and by register. CC BY-SA 4.0.

  B. New, C. Pallier, G. Schalchli, J. Bourgin & M. Gimenes (2026). Lexique 4: A major upgrade of the "Lexique" French lexical database. Behavior Research Methods, 58(5), 140.

• Wiktionary

  Pronunciation (IPA), where an entry has one - coverage is partial, and a word without one shows none. CC BY-SA and GFDL, dual-licensed.

  Obtained in machine-readable form from kaikki.org. Tatu Ylonen (2022). Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data. LREC 2022, pp. 1317-1325.