Where do the 1,000 words learners meet first come from? We traced every one: the language it came into English from, and its root in Proto-Indo-European. The answer draws a curve: the most common words are 🏡 Old English, and around word 400, 🗼 French and 🏛️ Latin take over.
Each point is a band of 100 words, from the most common (1–100) to the thousandth.
| Rank | 🏡 English | ⛵ Norse | 🗼🏛️ French, Latin | 🎭 Greek |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1–100 | 90% | 6% | 4% | 0% |
| 101–200 | 73% | 3% | 19% | 5% |
| 201–300 | 63% | 5% | 27% | 4% |
| 301–400 | 44% | 2% | 45% | 5% |
| 401–500 | 42% | 4% | 49% | 2% |
| 501–600 | 29% | 1% | 59% | 10% |
| 601–700 | 33% | 4% | 56% | 3% |
| 701–800 | 28% | 3% | 60% | 6% |
| 801–900 | 27% | 7% | 58% | 6% |
| 901–1000 | 29% | 1% | 60% | 8% |
But we do not use all words equally. Weighted by how often each word is actually used, the 1,000 words are 82% Old English, 3% Norse, 13% French and Latin and 1% Greek. A few hundred old English words do most of the work.
Counting each word once: 415 Old English, 35 Norse, 389 French or Latin, 45 Greek and 16 from elsewhere (Italian risk, bank, manage, Dutch trade, or unknown: job, girl, boy, goal).
Pick your language. We count a word as a head start when an everyday word in your language looks and means nearly the same: government and gouvernement, water and Wasser, doctor and डॉक्टर.
A rough guide, checked by hand. Hindi counts English words used every day in Hindi (Hinglish). For Chinese the head start is close to zero: the stories behind the words are the way in.
French and Latin words are new to English, but most are old Indo-European words too: president and sit share the root *sed-; mother (Old English) and maternal (Latin) share *méh₂tēr. Weighted by use, 97% of these 1,000 words go back to a known or probable PIE root.
| Rank | Word | Came from | PIE? | Easy spelling | Scholarly | Note |
|---|
Tap a column title to sort. Words with a link have a full Word Story. COCA lists some words twice for different word classes, so its first 1,000 entries make 900 different words. A word’s route is the language it entered English from; Greek words usually came through Latin or French. Roots follow Watkins and the Online Etymology Dictionary; “probable” marks a root scholars still debate. Spotted a mistake? Tell us below.
Frequency: Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), top 60,000 lemmas. First pass of origins: Etymological WordNet (de Melo 2014), then checked by hand, word by word, against Wiktionary (November 2026), the Online Etymology Dictionary and Watkins, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.