SPOKEN
OpenSubtitles 2018
Film and television subtitles. Excellent for conversational Spanish, and the reason a list built on it alone over-ranks greetings and interjections.
CC-BY-SA
Source
Method
How the order is decided
The whole site hangs off one claim: that this is the real order of Spanish by frequency. That claim is only worth anything if the working is visible, so here it is.
The corpora
NEWS
Leipzig Corpora — news 2022
Spanish-language journalism. Brings in the vocabulary of public life — government, economy, law — that dialogue barely touches.
CC-BY
Source
ENCYCLOPEDIC
Leipzig Corpora — Wikipedia 2021
Spanish Wikipedia. Formal, descriptive prose, and the source that keeps abstract and technical vocabulary in proportion.
CC-BY
Source
One corpus is a genre, not a language. Subtitles alone would teach you to follow a film and leave you lost in a newspaper; Wikipedia alone would do the reverse. Each word is ranked on how it behaves across all three.
How they are combined
01
Rates, not counts
The corpora are different sizes, so raw counts cannot be compared. Each is converted to occurrences per million words first.
02
Geometric mean
The three rates are averaged in log space. This rewards a word that is moderately common everywhere over one that spikes in a single register — which is what "most used" should mean.
03
What is removed
Proper nouns, detected by how often the word appears capitalised in the case-preserving sources. Plus abbreviations, filler, and unaccented misspellings of words already in the list. A word must appear in at least two corpora to rank at all.
04
What is added
Translations, part of speech, level and an example sentence are written by hand. Pronunciation is derived from the spelling rather than stored, because Spanish orthography is regular enough to do it reliably.
What blending actually changes
SUBTITLES OVER-RANK
High in a subtitle-only list, far lower once news and encyclopedic text are included:
- sabes
- hola
- oh
- quieres
- has
- dios
- vas
- papá
- necesito
- dije
- oye
- crees
- conmigo
- mierda
BLENDING RESTORES
Ordinary Spanish that dialogue barely uses, and that a subtitle list would have left out of the first thousand:
- nacional
- partido
- debido
- zona
- nivel
- público
- diferentes
- varios
- proyecto
- serie
- total
- principal
- finalmente
- obra
What is finished
11,0002,0003,0004,0005,000
Translated · 5,000
Each dot = 10 words, ordered by frequency
All 5,000 are ranked, and all 5,000 are translated: every word has an English and a German gloss, a part of speech, a CEFR level and an example sentence. The vocabulary test can therefore draw on the whole list, and it measures across the whole of it — only right at the top, past about 4,750, does it start reporting a floor instead of a number, because there are no rarer words left to test you on.
What this does not claim
- Three corpora are still three corpora. Regional Spanish, spoken conversation that never becomes a subtitle, and specialist registers are all under-represented.
- Words are ranked as they are written, so "es" and "ser" are separate entries. The lemma is named beside each one, because a learner meeting "es" should be told which verb it belongs to.
- CEFR levels are a considered judgement per word, not an official mapping. No exam board has blessed them.
- The list stops at 5,000. Spanish does not, so a word ranked 5,001 is missing here — and the test cannot tell whether you know 4,900 words or 15,000.