English words in German, French and Spanish

Of the three languages, German takes the most English words, French takes fewer and Spanish the fewest. We counted fourteen everyday English loans, from job and baby to cool, team and sorry, in film and television dialogue: German subtitles use them 7.4 times as often as Spanish ones and 2.7 times as often as French ones. German says Job, Baby, Party and Team as ordinary words. French says week-end and cool, and keeps an official commission to propose French alternatives. Spanish more often respells what it borrows, so stress becomes estrés and leader becomes líder. And each language has English words that English speakers would not recognise, like the German Handy, a mobile phone.

Updated 11 October 2026 · 7 min read

Which English words does each language use?

Every figure below is how many times the word is said per million words of subtitles: 156 million words of German, 318 million of French and 423 million of Spanish. Plurals are added in (job and jobs), and so are the French spellings week-end and week-ends.

German leads on nine of the fourteen. Job alone is 62 times as common in German as in Spanish. The biggest English loan of all, OK, is left out here because it has a post of its own.

Some words were left out because the spelling is also a native word: French parties means "parts", and "left" in elles sont parties, "they have left"; and Spanish date is "give yourself", as in date prisa, "hurry up". The ones kept can still be English quoted inside a film, a song lyric or a name, so the smallest figures are an upper limit.

German: Job, Baby, Party and Team

In German these are the normal words, and the native alternatives are rarer or mean something narrower:

• Baby is said 244 times as often as Säugling, the native word for an infant.
• Team is said 8.8 times as often as Mannschaft.
• Party (129.5 per million) beats Feier (17.62) and leaves Fete (1.56) far behind.
• Job (247.5) cannot quite be set against Arbeit (379.77), because Arbeit also means work in general. But German has taken Job for the thing you go to and get paid for.

German does not take every English word, though. Weekend barely registers: Wochenende is said 257 times as often. And sorry (50.0 per million), common as it is, is still well behind Entschuldigung (181.89).

Borrowing in the other direction, from German into English, is measured in German words used in English.

French: week-end, cool, and the official alternatives

French takes fewer English words than German, but the ones it takes are firmly settled. Week-end, spelled with a hyphen, is the ordinary French word: 57.9 per million, against almost nothing in German or Spanish. Cool is a little more common in French than in German.

Elsewhere French holds out. It says équipe 8 times as often as team. And it almost never says sorry: désolé and its forms come up 931 times per million words, about 846 times as often.

France also has a state body that proposes French words to replace English ones. Since 1996 the Commission d'enrichissement de la langue française has approved new terms, which are published in the Journal officiel and must be used by the administration. Older French coinages did the same job before it. Whether people take them up is another matter:

Ordinateur is the great success. It was introduced by IBM France in 1955, after François Girard, head of its advertising, asked his former literature professor, Jacques Perret, for a French name for the company's new machine, and today ordinateur is said 148 times as often as computer. Mercatique and mot-dièse are the opposite case: proposed for official use, and almost never said. The story of courriel, the official word for an email, and how it fares against e-mail and mail is in how many words are there in French.

Spanish: borrow it, then respell it

Spanish subtitles use the fewest English words of the three. For most of the list Spanish simply has its own everyday word: fiesta (223.82 per million) for a party, equipo (251.8) for a team, jefe (279.85) for a boss.

When Spanish does take an English word, it often rewrites it to fit Spanish spelling. Stress gains an e and an accent and becomes estrés:

Sometimes the respelling wins outright: líder is said 116 times as often as leader, and estrés 11 times as often as stress. Sometimes it does not. Güisqui is the form the Real Academia Española suggested, and whisky is said 45 times as often. Manager without the accent still beats mánager.

English words that are not English: Handy, footing and puenting

Each language also has words that look English and are not used that way in English. Linguists call them pseudo-anglicisms:

Handy is the giant. German subtitles say it 73 times as often as Mobiltelefon, and it has been in the Duden spelling dictionary since 1996. Where it came from is still argued over: perhaps from Motorola's "Handie-Talkie" radio, perhaps a German invention built on Hand. French parking is an English word with a French meaning: in French it is the place, where English would say car park or parking lot. Pressing also counts the football sense, "pressing the other team", so the dry-cleaner figure is an upper limit.

A warning about subtitles

A large share of the films and series behind these subtitles were made in English. A translator rendering "my job" or "the team" may well keep the English word, so the counts measure the language as it is subtitled, which is also the language a learner meets on screen. They are not a recording of a street in Berlin, Paris or Madrid.

What this means if you are learning one of them

In German, the English words are a free gift: Job, Team, Party and Handy are what people say, and they take a gender like any noun (der Job, das Team, die Party, das Handy). In French, learn the French word first and treat the English one as a bonus: désolé, not sorry; équipe, not team. In Spanish, expect English words to arrive respelled, and learn them that way.

Verbavia (our own course) teaches each language from a frequency list of the words people really say, with the grammar explained in English and reading, listening and writing sections built from words you already know. It is free on the web, in any browser, including on a phone. Start with the most common German words, or the lists for French and Spanish; the German course is one lesson a day, and the German vocabulary test shows how far down the list you already are.

Sources

• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. Every rate is counted from its German, French and Spanish lists; the forms added up for each word, and the ones left out, are in scripts/frequency_anglicisms.py.
• Wikipedia (French): Commission d'enrichissement de la langue française, created by decree on 3 July 1996; terms published in the Journal officiel and compulsory in the administration.
• Wikipedia (French): Ordinateur, the word introduced by IBM France in 1955 after François Girard consulted Jacques Perret.
• Wiktionnaire: mercatique, coined in 1974 and recommended for marketing; mot-dièse, published in the Journal officiel on 23 January 2013 for hashtag, and rarely used.
• Wiktionary: estrés, líder, fútbol (and futbol in Mexico and Central America), mánager, güisqui ("rarely used hispanicized spelling suggested by the Real Academia Española") and esmoquin (from French smoking, a pseudo-anglicism).
• Wiktionary: Handy, the competing explanations of its origin; Duden: Handy, a small mobile phone, in the spelling dictionary since 1996.
• Wikipedia: Pseudo-anglicism, for Handy, Beamer, Oldtimer and Mobbing; French smoking, footing, pressing and brushing; Spanish puenting and footing.
• Larousse: parking (a car park; from English), footing ("faux anglicisme") and pressing (a dry cleaner's; also the football sense).