5000 Most Common English Words List Jun 2026

The very top of the list is dominated by function words (pronouns, prepositions, and articles) and basic verbs. Notable Word Lists and Resources

| Word Range | Cumulative Coverage | Typical Words | |------------|--------------------|----------------| | Top 1,000 | ~75% of any text | the, be, to, of, and, a, in, that, have, I | | Next 2,000 | ~85% | accept, allow, church, decision, forget | | Next 3-5,000| ~90-95% | abandon, awkward, census, drought, zebra | 5000 most common english words list

# Tokenize the text and remove stopwords stopwords = nltk.corpus.stopwords.words('english') tokens = [word.lower() for word in brown.words() if word.isalpha() and word.lower() not in stopwords] The very top of the list is dominated

Many standardized tests align roughly with these frequency bands: I | | Next 2

The first 500–1,000 words are dominated by "function words" (articles, prepositions, pronouns) and high-frequency verbs. The Oxford 5000™ (American English)