Spanish: the first 1,000 words
1,000 Spanish headwords, ranked by how often they appear in a large mix of written and subtitle text. Each comes with its most useful meaning, an example sentence, and an English translation.
Browse by rank
Each page lists 100 words with their meanings, examples, and regional notes.
The 12 most common
el · de · que · a · en · y · uno · ser · no · se · por · con
Short function words dominate the top of every frequency list. Content words such as casa, tiempo, and trabajo follow soon after.
How the list was built
Frequencies come from the open wordfreq dataset. Word forms were grouped under one headword (for example tengo, tiene, tenía under tener), and proper nouns, abbreviations, and English loan tokens were removed. Meanings and example sentences were written for this project and checked automatically, but they haven’t yet been reviewed by a native speaker. Read the full methodology or report a mistake.
Regional Spanish
Entries note where Latin American and European Spanish differ, such as vosotros (Spain) and ustedes (everywhere), or coche, carro, and auto for “car.” Regional alternatives are attached to the same word and aren’t counted as extra entries.