English Frequency Dictionary: “download-for-free-without-registration. The most common words in the English language Frequency dictionary with 16,000 words

The article contains 625 basic words for beginners to learn English.
The author of this list is Gabriel Wyner.

The list is compiled very competently, according to thematic groups. So that it is easy and not tiring for you to learn words.

The main idea of ​​such a list is not to study similar words, in which up to 40% of words are forgotten. On the contrary, all the words are selected according to a specific topic: animals, food, weather, city, people, frequent verbs, etc. Only 625 words.

How to use

1. Be sure to check each word for pronunciation.

2. The same applies to the translation of words. It is better if you use a direct dictionary in English. For beginners, learning a language completely from scratch is somewhat problematic and time-consuming, but it’s true!

3. Use flashcards to memorize words if necessary.

4. Record yourself and your pronunciation on mp-4.

After learning your first 625 words, you will only be able to open your mouth a little and say something intelligible. But this is a great start for a beginner learning English.

Pronouns: Pronouns

I, you (singular), he, she, it,

we, you (plural, as in “y’all”), they.

Animal: Animals

dog, cat, fish, bird, cow, pig, mouse, horse, wing.

Transportation: Transport

train, plane, car, truck, bicycle, bus, boat, ship, tire, gasoline, engine, (train) ticket.

Location: Location

city, house, apartment, street/road, airport, train station,

bridge, hotel, restaurant, farm, court, school, office,

room, town, university, club, bar, park, camp, store/shop, theater,

library, hospital, church, market, country (USA, France, etc.),

building, ground, space (outer space), bank.

Clothes: Clothes

hat, dress, suit, skirt, shirt, T-shirt, pants, shoes, pocket, coat, stain.

Color: Colors

red, green, blue (light/dark), yellow, brown, pink, orange, black, white, gray.

People: People

son, daughter, mother, father, parent (= mother/father), baby,

man, woman, brother, sister*, family, grandfather, grandmother,

husband*, wife, boy, girl, child (= boy/girl),

king, queen, president, neighbor, adult (= man/woman), human (≠ animal),

friend (Add a friend’s name), victim, player, fan, crowd, person.

Job: Professions

Teacher, student, lawyer, doctor, patient, waiter, secretary, priest,

police, army, soldier, artist, author, manager, reporter, actor.

Society: Society

religion, heaven, hell, death, medicine, money, dollar, bill,

marriage, wedding*, team, race (ethnicity), sex (the act),

sex (gender), murder, prison, technology, energy, war, peace,

attack, election, magazine, newspaper, poison, gun, sport, race (sport),

exercise, ball, game, price, contract, drug, sign, science, God.

Art: Art

band, song, instrument (musical), music, movie.

Beverages: Drinks

coffee, tea, wine, beer, juice, water, milk.

Food: Food

egg, cheese, bread, soup, cake, chicken, pork, beef,

apple, banana, orange, lemon, corn, rice, oil, seed,

knife, spoon, fork, plate, cup,

breakfast, lunch, dinner, sugar, salt, bottle.

Home: Home

table, chair, bed, dream, window, door, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom,

pencil, pen, photograph, soap, book, page, key, paint, letter, note,

wall, paper, floor, ceiling, roof, pool, lock, telephone,

garden, yard, needle, bag, box, gift, card, ring, tool.

Electronics: Technology

clock, lamp, fan, cell phone, network, computer, program (computer),

laptop, screen, camera, television, radio.

Body: Body

head, neck, face, beard, hair, eye, mouth, lip,

nose, tooth, ear, tear (drop), tongue, back, toe,

finger, foot, hand, leg, arm, shoulder, heart, blood,

brain, knee, sweat, disease, bone, voice, skin.

Nature: Nature

sea, ocean, river, mountain, rain, snow, tree, sun, moon,

world, Earth, forest, sky, plant, wind, soil/earth,

flower, valley, root, lake, star, grass, leaf, air,

sand, beach, wave, fire, ice, island, hill, heat.

Materials: Substances and materials

glass, metal, plastic, wood, stone, diamond, clay, dust, gold, copper, silver.

Math/Measurements: Mathematical measurements

meter, centimeter, kilogram, inch, foot, pound, half,

circle, square, temperature, date, weight, edge, corner.

Misc Nouns: Miscellaneous nouns

map, dot, consonant, vowel, light, sound, yes, no, piece, pain,

injury, hole, image, pattern, noun, verb, adjective.

Directions: Directions

top, bottom, side, front, back, outside, inside, up, down,

left, right, straight, north, south, east, west.

Seasons: Seasons

Summer, Spring, Winter, Fall.

Months: Months

January, February, March, April, May, June, July,
August, September, October, November, December.

Days of the week: Days of the week

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

Numbers: Numbers

curved, male, female, tight, loose, high, low, soft, hard, deep,

shallow, clean, dirty, strong, weak, dead, alive, heavy,

light (heavy), dark, light (dark), nuclear, famous.

Verbs: Verbs

work, play, walk, run, drive, fly, swim, go, stop, follow,

think, speak/say, eat, drink, kill, die, smile, laugh, cry,

buy, pay, sell, shoot(a gun), learn, jump, smell, hear* (a sound),

listen* (music), taste, touch, see (a bird), watch (TV), kiss, burn,

melt, dig, explode, sit, stand, love, pass by, cut, fight, lie down,

dance, sleep, wake up, sing, count, marry, pray, win, lose,

mix/stir, bend, wash, cook, open, close, write, call, turn,

build, teach, grow, draw, feed, catch, throw, clean, find, fall,

push, pull, carry, break, wear, hang, shake, sign, beat, lift.

There is a misconception which reads something like this:

It is enough to know 500 English words in order to communicate freely with a native speaker on any topic.

This is wrong.

Look at the list and try to communicate freely in English with only 625 words to your credit. And you will understand that this is NOT real.
The maximum that is possible with such a set of words is to speak at the level of children's vocabulary.

At the moment I know about 3700 English words, which allows me to write letters to my American friends fluently. But this does not give me the opportunity to freely communicate with them on any topic. Knowing even these 3 thousand, I will not be able to say even the most basic things about jurisprudence, medicine, religion and other seemingly “free” topics.

After I decided to improve my level of English (mainly in terms of vocabulary), it almost immediately became obvious that the most effective way to learn words is exclusively from frequency dictionaries. More precisely, the methods of studying and memorizing can be very different, but it is precisely the order and priority of certain words that should be determined based on frequency dictionaries.

Let's say you are reading a book in English, and every 10 words you come across one unknown thing. Imagine, at first I wrote down every unknown word and crammed them all every day. But very soon it became clear that the effectiveness of such study is close to zero - since most of these words appear only once or twice in the entire book, and in everyday vocabulary they can appear once a year.

This is where the frequency dictionary comes to the rescue. The idea is this: you come across a word whose translation you don’t know. First you remember: how often does it occur to you in general? If this word is in the category of “yes, I’ve heard it many times, but I don’t know how it’s translated,” confidently set it to study and repeat. If you rarely come across this word, or you can’t remember it at all, then it’s time to look into the frequency dictionary.

There is such a wonderful service Test Your Vocabulary, which allows you to roughly determine your vocabulary using a small sample (several dozen words), by comparing your results with available statistical analysis data. There are also various graphs of results, for example, this is the distribution of participants (non-English speaking) by vocabulary:

As you can see, the vocabulary level of most people is around 4500 words. The median of the distribution is around 7800 words (half of the people have less vocabulary, half have more).

According to other linguistic studies, a vocabulary of 6–7 thousand words guarantees the understanding of 85% of English speech. Thus, we can conclude that a 6,000-year-old dictionary may be a perfectly acceptable goal to begin with.

So, returning to our algorithm. After you have found a word completely unknown to you, immediately look for it in the frequency dictionary. If, for example, you set out to increase your vocabulary to at least 6,000 thousand words, and the word you are looking for is in the first 6 thousand, put it on repeat.

In fact, after studying the first 6000 in the emergency, your vocabulary will, of course, be larger, due to those words that you already know and which were not included in the studied interval of the emergency.

Well, now the question. Where can I get a frequency dictionary? In Google? No matter how it is.

As a rule, sites for learning English offer us only the first thousand words of emergency, and you will have to pay for a more extensive dictionary. Yes, the first search for a dictionary of at least 3000 words caused me a storm of indignation. But then I still managed to find a very extensive dictionary, which, however, could not be used to search for words: it was divided into many pages, and the text, by the way, was protected from copy-paste (helps, of course, only in the case of schoolchildren or housewives). Therefore, in order to work normally with the frequency dictionary, I (not without a certain amount of ingenuity) snatched the code from the pages and combined the first 6000 words I needed into one table.

Enjoy it and long live free access to information.

Update: expanded the table to 16,000 words. This dictionary should cover 98% of English phrases.

Note: some numbers are missing in the table - these are proper names, which simply do not make sense to translate.

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Frequency lists and frequency dictionaries reflect the fact that in living languages ​​a small proportion of words (7-8%) - the most common words - occur frequently (82-87% of the total number of words in the test text), and the overwhelming number of other words (92 -95% of the total vocabulary of the language) are rare (12-15%), and a huge part of them are generally unfamiliar even to educated native speakers. In everyday and ordinary socio-political texts, this difference is much more significant and can be characterized more strongly: “extremely often” and “extremely rarely.”

It is clear that the assessments are quite arbitrary, test texts for oral and written speech are different, their formation is not free from the author’s subjectivity, etc. However, it is clear that, given the same effort, prioritizing the acquisition of more “frequent” words is, generally speaking, more effective for expanding vocabulary and understanding the English language than rare or random ones that may simply not be encountered again.
Many discussions, alphabetical and frequency lists, and dictionaries can be found on the Internet. To save your time, links to some of them are given below. They can be downloaded.

Frequency lists and dictionaries of the English language

"Frequency" is the number of occurrences of a word in a test text of a specified length, sometimes expressed as a percentage. Below is one of the many more or less similar versions of the table of words, covering approximately 50% of the vocabulary of ordinary texts. There are 135 of them. In the right column, their total “frequency” is indicated cumulatively in 5% increments.

Here are a few lists of the most common words different volumes from different sources that can be downloaded:

As you can see, words in them can be grouped according to different criteria: by frequency, by alphabet or by functional groups, etc.

Different dictionaries of the most common words compiled on the basis of these lists. Sometimes the alphabetical dictionary entry is followed by the number 1, 2, ... It indicates that the word belongs to the first, second, etc. thousand most frequent.

Most interesting and informative frequency lists, ordered precisely by “word frequency” and including individual frequency. Here are a couple of lists of varying lengths from different sources that you can download:

Consider the following graph:

This percentage distribution (on a semi-log scale) of the most common words with cumulative frequency is obtained from the frequency list "7059". It predicts, for example, that the first 135 words cover about half (50%) and 2000 about three quarters (75%) of the arbitrary text.

First, as expected, it's clear that few words are heavily weighted (notice the 50% level, for example, and compare to the 135-word table) - these are the most frequent, important, useful words for your vocabulary.

Secondly, it follows from the graph that almost from the very beginning, in order to increase text recognition by another 5-10%, you need to approximately double the number of frequent, useful words studied. Get ready to work.

Thirdly, the table does not include words with a frequency of less than 10 per 1,000,000 (0.001%). The likelihood of encountering a specific omitted word in a random text is negligible. However, for some it may be the essence and most accurate reflection of the subject of the statement.

IN frequency dictionaries frequency can be indicated by a number behind the dictionary entry. Or after the usual alphabetical dictionary there is a frequency list on the basis of which the dictionary is compiled. However, now that computer versions of dictionaries are available in various forms and in any configuration and order, there is only one problem - the problem of the time required to choose the one most suitable for you.

You can find and download many dictionaries of different types for free, in particular.

Here is a simple frequency dictionary of 2500 words, divided for your convenience into steps of 300, 500, 1000 and the full 2500 words, which you can download for yourself right now:

Three sources, three components of your vocabulary

• Training courses and frequency lists (dictionaries)
• Fiction, socio-political and special literature
• Live social and professional communication and mass media

The training courses are based on the most commonly used vocabulary. But they are limited in volume, and in addition, they contain inevitable “gaps”, omissions in successive lists of frequency words. Upon completion of the course, it is wise to fill in these gaps and expand your vocabulary, moving along the frequency list: sooner or later, what you have learned will definitely come in handy, and this will be effective due to its “frequency”. However, it is reasonable to apply this process until you achieve the practically necessary 3-5 (depending on your requirements) thousand more or less firmly, actively (i.e., with the possibility of not just understanding, but fairly free practical use) memorized words. And there may be much more poorly known, only passively recognized words. Further, the effectiveness decreases: the “weight” of the new word decreases and its “specialization” increases, which means that the likelihood that you really need it decreases.

Literature is an invaluable source of vocabulary. Since even for educational purposes you choose sources that interest you, there is a high probability that their vocabulary will be useful to you. But even within the framework of your interest, strive to study not all unfamiliar words, but only the most frequent, most common words (which appear in the text more than once or twice) in order to significantly speed up reading and increase its understanding. Literature allows you to consolidate the learned forms, expand them and improve their recognition in the text.

It is very difficult to force yourself to consciously control your reading speed. We must soberly realize that there are two approaches, two goals: “plot” reading for the sake of meaningful information and “analytical” reading. Analytical slow reading is aimed at full awareness of all the lexical, grammatical and stylistic features of the text. This is a form of direct learning, mastering and consolidating the composition and forms of speech. However, overuse of such reading is fraught with a certain loss of such valuable interest in the process, as when watching a film for a long time in slow motion. But something else is more dangerous: developing the habit of constantly reading at a low speed to the detriment of the desire to emotionally and figuratively perceive “entertaining” and exciting plot texts or quickly look through special texts in search of valuable material. An old example: a postman, freed from a heavy bag that he had been carrying for many years, can no longer change the established pace of movements. You know about the dangers and avert them; you combine both methods wisely, according to your taste and controlled sensations. He who is forewarned is forearmed!

Live communication is the hope of many. However, the ability to grasp and imprint new things on the fly is high in children - and for them this is effective and paramount, but for adults it is problematic. Of course, there are some frequency forms that immediately “fall on the ear.” Unfortunately, many are content with vulgarisms such as mentioning in vain “Ah, my God!” and sickening “Big deal!”, “Shit!”, “Wow!”. Your problem is what to know and perceive, and what to use in your speech. You go from the basic ability to explain yourself for survival to a level corresponding to your general education and social circle. In communication and professional activities, you master the most important social and special vocabulary for you. The same approach can be applied to mass media with effect. You start with popular television programs and films with English subtitles and move on, but be sure to select and consolidate the most important and interesting forms and vocabulary for you.

Thus, there is no single and sufficient source for effectively learning English vocabulary. Knowing the possibilities and approaches, you try and find the most suitable “cocktail” for you in order to get maximum pleasure and results.

Detailed information about the methods, programs and results of teaching English at Mr. Ball's School is presented on the School's website.
Addresses and telephone numbers for questions about teaching English at Mr. Ball's School and appointments for interviews can be found on the website mrBall.by in the section