Are you curious to know what words Lingvist teaches you? Interested in word frequencies? Look no further! Our users have told us that it would be helpful to know what words they will be learning and how frequent these words are in everyday language.
We have decided to make these statistics on the first 2000 words available to you. Below, you will find a word list for our English course with absolute word frequencies, as well as probabilities, which are a bit more informative, as they are normalized for the size of the corpus (in our case, 9,550,053,512 words – that’s 9.5 billion, in case you were having trouble making sense of this number).
So, what does this mean? If you pick a random word from anything you read or hear in English, there is a 0.13% chance that it will be the word “time.” By comparison, there is a nearly 4% chance that you will encounter the article “the.” It really pays off to learn a language roughly in the order of frequency, right?!
However, as you can see, our courses don’t strictly follow the order of frequency, as it would be pretty boring and meaningless to learn all the function words first (“the,” “it,” “is”), and there would be no words with which to create sentences and meaning. Our courses are therefore ordered based not only on these frequencies, but also including word forms, age of acquisition, and the importance of the example sentences.
| Priority in Lingvist's general course | Word | Example Sentence | Probability that you will encounter this word in an English text | Absolute frequency of this word |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | time | time | 0.1266% | 12031190 |
| 2 | name | name | 0.0332% | 3152330 |
| 3 | day | day | 0.0591% | 5619119 |
| 4 | life | life | 0.0434% | 4128125 |
| 5 | world | world | 0.0537% | 5104379 |
| 6 | place | place | 0.0339% | 3226036 |
| 7 | home | Where are you? – I am at home. | 0.0454% | 4316677 |
| 8 | year | year | 0.0701% | 6663565 |
| 9 | man | There is one man and two women in the car. | 0.0276% | 2624364 |
| 10 | night | night | 0.0227% | 2155279 |
| 11 | car | car | 0.0178% | 1688911 |
| 12 | school | school | 0.0364% | 3456713 |
| 13 | number | number | 0.0354% | 3362808 |
| 14 | thing | What is this thing? | 0.0251% | 2388671 |
| 15 | the | the world | 3.8625% | 367042929 |
| 16 | end | the end | 0.0362% | 3439586 |
| 17 | money | money | 0.0233% | 2217568 |
| 18 | business | business | 0.0352% | 3343274 |
| 19 | part | part | 0.0420% | 3993617 |
| 20 | a | a year | 1.6114% | 153131245 |
