The 100 Most Common Arabic Words, Counted From Real Usage

The most common basic Arabic words are short ones: لا (la, no), من (min, from), في (fi, in), أن (an, that) and أنا (ana, I). In a count of 166 million words of Arabic subtitles, the top 100 words make up 33.6 percent of the text. The full ranked list is below.

The counts come from hermitdave/FrequencyWords, a word count of the Arabic part of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus. We cleaned it (rules at the end) and added the other columns. Transliteration: kh as in Scottish loch, gh a gargled r, ʿ for ع, ʾ for a glottal stop. No dots and no long-vowel marks, so بعد (after) and بعض (some) are both baʿd; the Arabic column tells them apart.

The 100 most common Arabic words

Only 28 of the 100 are verbs, nouns or adjectives. "MSA and spoken" means you will also hear the word, or a close version of it, in everyday Egyptian or Levantine speech. "MSA" means speakers swap it for another word, listed further down.

Just outside the hundred: أيها (ayyuha, O, before a title) at 160,711 and اليوم (al-yawm, today) at 160,616.

The same 100 words, grouped by what they do

Grouped by job, the list is mostly grammar. Pronouns, demonstratives, question words, negatives, prepositions and conjunctions make up 47 of the 100. Learn the pronouns and the question words side by side and you can already ask what, where, how and why.

Five of the 15 verbs are forms of كان (kana, to be) and two are forms of ليس (laysa, is not). The rest say what someone knows, thinks, wants, must do or can do. The only concrete nouns are رجل (rajul, man) and شخص (shakhs, person). The list has two words for "I know", أعرف (aʿrif) and the more formal أعلم (aʿlam), and two for "yes", نعم (naʿam) and the more formal أجل (ajal).

Subtitle Arabic is Modern Standard, not dialect

Arabic subtitles are written in Modern Standard Arabic, even when the characters on screen are chatting. The corpus is a collection of translated movie subtitles, and the counts show the translators almost never write dialect.

In the OpenSubtitles 2018 Arabic count, ماذا (madha, what) appears 905,328 times; Levantine شو (shu, what) 3,984 times. ليس (laysa, is not) appears 534,750 times; مش (mish, not), used in both Cairo and Damascus, 2,046 times. الآن (al-ʾan, now) appears 616,758 times; Egyptian دلوقتي (dilwaʾti) 178 and Levantine هلق (hallaʾ) 84, counting all their spellings.

By our judgement in the Register column, 49 of the 100 are MSA words that speakers replace in everyday talk; the table below covers 17 of the commonest. Here is what Egyptians and Levantines say instead, checked against Wiktionary (for example dilwaʾti and hallaʾ). For courses that teach the spoken forms, see our Egyptian Arabic learning path and courses for spoken Levantine.

One trap: إيه (eh) means what in Cairo and yes in Beirut. If your goal is talking to people rather than reading, we think this table matters more than the ranking above it.

How this list compares with the most common Quran words

Matched spelling for spelling, 25 of these words are also in our table of the 100 most common words in the Quran, nearly all of them small words: من (min, from), ما (ma, what), لا (la, no), في (fi, in), على (ʿala, on), إلى (ila, to), الذي (alladhi, who) and كان (kana, was) sit in the top 30 of both. The rest differ. The Quran list is full of nouns about God and the world, such as رب (rabb, lord) and أرض (ard, earth). The subtitle list has the words of people talking: you, okay, thank you, I want.

They also count differently. The Quran figures are lemma counts: قال (qala, he said) includes every form of the verb. Ours are word-form counts, so كان (kana, he was), كانت (kanat, she was) and كنت (kuntu, I was) take three places. That is part of why 100 Quran lemmas cover 55.4 percent of the Quran while our 100 word forms cover 33.6 percent of the subtitles.

How to use this list

We would learn the top 20 first, inside short sentences rather than as single words, because most have no fixed English equivalent: ما (ma) is what in one sentence and not in the next. Our basic Arabic sentences, built word by word put them in context, and common Arabic phrases in MSA, Levantine and Egyptian gives greetings with their replies.

Coverage climbs fast, then slows: the top 20 words make up 18.4 percent of the text, the top 100 33.6 percent, the top 500 48.5 percent and the top 1,000 54.9 percent. Frequency lists are weak on concrete nouns, so pair this one with topic lists such as fruits and vegetables in Arabic and the word lists in our Arabic vocabulary resources. When these hundred feel easy, take our 30-question Arabic level test.

How we built the list

We started from the 2018 Arabic list (ar_50k.txt and the full list it is cut from), which gives each word form with its count. The full list holds 166,157,309 tokens containing an Arabic letter; every percentage here is a share of that total. We made four changes:

• We merged spelling variants within the top 8,000 entries: tokens that differ only in vowel marks or tanwin (حسناً and حسنا, hasanan, okay), hamza-less spellings where only one word fits (انا for أنا, ana, I), final ى for ي (فى for في, fi, in), and شئ for شيء (shayʾ, thing).
• We kept apart words that only vowel marks distinguish. مَن (man, who) is not merged into مِن (min, from), nor لِمَ (lima, why) into لم (lam, did not). Unmarked من covers both, so its count includes some man.
• We left out spellings that could be two different words. ان (597,153) could be an (that) or in (if); انه (245,723) could be annahu or innahu; علي (162,651) could be ʿalayya (on me), the name Ali, or a misspelt ʿala. Unsplit, ان would rank about 28th.
• We skipped tokens that are not words: the Arabic comma (5,527,080, the most frequent token), the stretching stroke ـ, stray single letters, and prefixes the tokenizer split off, chiefly و (wa-, and) at 1,182,541. Our Quran list leaves prefixes out for the same reason.

Different forms of one word stay separate: شيء (shayʾ, thing) and its object form شيئا (shayʾan, something) are spelled differently and counted apart. FrequencyWords content is CC BY-SA 4.0, so our ranked table carries the same licence. You can reuse it if you credit FrequencyWords and keep CC BY-SA 4.0.

Frequently asked questions

What are 100 common Arabic words?

The 100 most common Arabic words, counted from 166 million words of Arabic subtitles, start with la (no), min (from), fi (in), an (that), hadha (this), ana (I), ʿala (on), ma (what, not), hal (the yes/no question marker) and anta (you). Only 28 of the hundred are verbs, nouns or adjectives. The rest are pronouns, prepositions, question words and other small words. Together the 100 make up 33.6 percent of the text.

Can you give me 20 basic Arabic words?

The 20 most frequent Arabic words in subtitles are la (no), min (from), fi (in), an (that), hadha (this), ana (I), ʿala (on), ma (what), hal (question marker), anta (you), ya (hey), dhalika (that), laqad (marks a finished action), ila (to), hasanan (okay), lam (did not), madha (what), kana (was), huna (here) and huwa (he). Between them they make up 18.4 percent of the text.

What are 1000 basic Arabic words?

There is no fixed list of 1,000, but a frequency count shows what 1,000 words buy you. In the OpenSubtitles 2018 Arabic list, after merging spelling variants, the top 1,000 word forms make up 54.9 percent of the text. The top 100 make up 33.6 percent and the top 500 make up 48.5 percent. Past 1,000 the gains slow: the top 2,000 reach 61.5 percent.

What is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 in Arabic?

In Modern Standard Arabic: wahid (1), ithnan (2), thalatha (3), arbaʿa (4), khamsa (5), sitta (6), sabʿa (7), thamaniya (8), tisʿa (9), ʿashara (10). Only wahid, one, comes close to the top 100 of the subtitle list, at rank 121. Ithnan, two, is down at 1,233. Arabic usually says two of something with a dual ending instead, as in kitaban, two books.

What is the most common word in Arabic?

In a count of Arabic subtitles it is la, meaning no or not, at 3,103,772 occurrences, just ahead of min (from) at 3,013,178. In the Quran the most common standalone word is min. Both counts leave out the prefix wa- (and), because it is written joined to the next word rather than standing alone.

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