The 200 most common English words

How many of the words we use most go back to Proto-Indo-European, the language spoken about 6,000 years ago? We checked the 200 most frequent words of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The answer: almost all of them.

The result

9 in 10 words you say are 6,000 years old

Weighted by how often each word is used, these old roots make up:

The most frequent words are the oldest. the, be, and, of, a, in, to, have, I, you all come from PIE. Words with no known root are mostly from Germanic alone (look, hand, begin) or from Latin words whose own origin is lost (people, perhaps from Etruscan).

COCA lists some words twice for different word classes (that as a conjunction and as a determiner), so its first 200 entries make 182 different words. Each root follows the standard reference works (Watkins, the Oxford tradition); “probable” marks a root that scholars still debate.

Where they came from

Old English first, French later

We also traced how each word came into English:

Rank	🏡 English	⛵ Norse	🗼 French	🏛️ Latin
1–100	89	6	5	0
101–182	60	3	15	4
All 182	149 (82%)	9 (5%)	20 (11%)	4 (2%)

Weighted by how often they are used, about 94% of these everyday words come from Old English.

⛵ The Vikings gave English its pronouns. they, their, them come from Old Norse, with get, take, want, call, same and seem. Languages almost never borrow pronouns: the Vikings and the English must have lived side by side in the north of England.

The French words start only around rank 80, and they are words of public life and ideas: people, state, country, problem, question, system, company, student. Four arrived from Latin before 1066: school, family, part, turn.

The further you go, the more French and Latin

📈 See our own curve for the top 1,000 words → French and Latin overtake Old English around word 400.

Larger studies show the same pattern. In the 1,000 most common words, about 83% are of English origin; in the 10,000 most common, only about a third are, with 41% French and 15% Latin (Williams 1975). Across a whole dictionary of 80,000 words, French and Latin make up about 28% each, and Germanic only about 25% (Finkenstaedt & Wolff 1973).

Level	Words mostly from	Easy for…
A1–A2 (top ~1,000)	🏡 Old English, ⛵ Norse	German, Dutch and Scandinavian speakers
B1–B2 (1,000–5,000)	🗼 French, 🏛️ Latin take over	French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese speakers
C1–C2, academic	🏛️ Latin, 🎭 Greek	speakers of Romance languages, and anyone who knows science words

That is why French and Spanish speakers often find beginner English hard and advanced English easy, while German speakers find the opposite. And for speakers of Hindi, Chinese or Arabic, every level is new: but the stories behind the words make them easier to remember.

All 182 words

Find a word

Rank	Word	Came from	PIE?	Easy spelling	Scholarly	Note

Tap a column title to sort. Words with a link have a full Word Story.

A few gems

Surprises in the list

be uses three PIE roots at once: be (*bʰuH-), is (*h₁es-) and was (*wes-).
have is a cousin of Latin capere, “to grasp”, as in capture.
find comes from *pent-, “to go”, the same root as path.
school comes from Greek skholē, “leisure”: school was what you did with free time!
world is “the age of man”: *wiHrós (man) + *h₂el- (grow, age).
group and crop are the same Germanic word, *kruppaz “lump, bunch”: one came straight into English, the other took a trip through Italy and France.
people has no known PIE root: Latin populus may be an Etruscan word.

Frequency: Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), top 60,000 lemmas. Origins of larger word lists: Joseph M. Williams, Origins of the English Language (1975); Finkenstaedt & Wolff, Ordered Profusion (1973). Roots: Calvert Watkins, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots; Online Etymology Dictionary; every word checked against Wiktionary (November 2026).