Is Esperanto vocabulary really easier? We counted

Yes, but not for the reason usually given. Esperanto's words are no easier for an English speaker to recognise than Spanish or Italian words: across 1,319 everyday meanings, 39.0% of the Esperanto words look like the English word, against 40.2% for Spanish and 39.0% for Italian. French does better than all three. What is easier is how the vocabulary multiplies. By our estimate, 44.1% of the 7,400 words in our Esperanto list are built from a word that comes earlier in the same list, so they cost a learner very little.

Updated 12 October 2026 · 7 min read

The claim, and two ways to test it

The usual case for Esperanto's vocabulary has two halves. The first is that the words are international: most roots come from the Romance languages, so anyone who knows English, French or Spanish recognises many of them on sight. The second is that the words are built: a small set of prefixes and suffixes turns one root into a family, so there are fewer things to memorise.

Both can be measured against our own frequency-ordered word lists. The first half turns out to be true and unremarkable. The second half is where the saving is.

Test one: do Esperanto words look like English?

We took the first single-word meaning of each entry in our Esperanto list, house, learn, often, and found the word our Spanish, French, Italian and German lists give for the same meaning. Then one rule was applied to all five languages: does the word look like the English word? "Look like" is a fixed measure of shared letters in order, with accents removed and Esperanto's grammatical ending set aside, so familio and family match and hundo and dog do not.

The left column uses only meanings from the first 1,000 words of the Esperanto list; the right, the first 3,000.

On both, Esperanto, Spanish and Italian are level, within about a point of each other. That is what you would expect of a language that took most of its roots from Latin and its descendants: its words are about as familiar as theirs, because they are largely the same words with regular endings. French is clearly ahead, which reflects how much of English vocabulary came from French. German is clearly behind, even though it is the closest relative of English here.

Some of each kind, from the top of the list:

• Recognisable: familio (family), floro (flower), tablo (table), hospitalo (hospital), vilaĝo (village), ĝardeno (garden), and from the Germanic side trinki (to drink), varma (warm), ofte (often).
• Not recognisable: bela (beautiful), juna (young), bona (good), libro (book), pano (bread), knabino (girl). A French or Italian speaker knows most of these at once; an English speaker has to learn them.

Three cautions about this table. The rule is crude, and misses pairs that a person would spot, such as akvo and aquatic. The other languages' words were found by matching English meanings between lists, which sometimes picks a less usual word, and that can only lower their scores, so the comparison leans in Esperanto's favour. And it is a test for English speakers only. A speaker of Mandarin, Japanese or Arabic recognises almost none of these roots in any of the five languages.

Test two: how many words are built from words you already know?

This is the half that sets Esperanto apart. Go down our list in order, as a learner does, and ask of each new word: have I already met its root?

There are two ways a word can be "already met".

The same root with a different ending. Esperanto marks the kind of word with its last letter: -o for a noun, -a for an adjective, -e for an adverb, -i for a verb. So once you know bona (good) you already have bone (well), and labori (to work) gives laboro (work). In the first 1,000 words of our list, 138 are a root you have already learned with a different ending.

A root plus an affix. Lerni is to learn; lernejo is a school, a place for learning; lernanto is a pupil. Another 75 of the first 1,000 are built this way. 16 of them use one prefix alone, mal-, which makes the opposite: malgranda, malvarma, malbona, malnova, malsana, malaperi, maljuna and malamiko.

Together that is 21.3% of the first 1,000 words. The share rises as the list goes on, because later words are increasingly made from earlier ones: 29.0% of the first 3,000 by our estimate, and 44.1% of all 7,400.

The affixes doing most of the work across the whole list:

The first-1,000 figures were checked by hand: we read every word the rule marked as built, and removed the 10 it had taken apart wrongly. Okulo (eye), for instance, is a root of its own, and only looks like ok (eight) plus the person suffix -ul-. Beyond the first 1,000 the rule runs unchecked, so those figures are estimates, and at that error rate they are a little high for the affix column.

No other language in our lists works like this. Spanish and French build words too, with -ción and -ment and the rest, but not with one small set of affixes that can be attached to any root and always mean the same thing.

What is not easier

A built word still has to be the word people use. The affixes let you make words nobody says. Malsanulejo, a place for sick people, is a correct word for a hospital, and in our list it comes far below hospitalo. A learner can decode every built word, but has to learn which ones are usual.

The roots that are not international. Knabo (boy), hundo (dog), ŝati (to like) and the 45 small "table words" for who, where, when and their answers look like nothing in English. Those, and the other places English speakers trip, are in is Esperanto hard to learn.

The long tail is still there. Whatever the language, the last few percent of any text are rare words, learned one at a time. Counted in film subtitles, Esperanto's frequency curve is not unusually steep; why that is, and what happens when the grammatical endings are stripped off, is measured in how many words you need to speak Esperanto.

So is Esperanto's vocabulary easier?

• Recognising words: about the same as Spanish or Italian for an English speaker, behind French, well ahead of German.
• Number of things to memorise: fewer. Well over a third of a 7,400-word vocabulary is assembled from the rest by rules that have no exceptions.
• Knowing which words are natural: not easier. That comes from reading and listening, as in any language.

The practical conclusion is to learn the endings and the eight or ten commonest affixes in the first weeks, because every root you learn afterwards then arrives as a family. Our Esperanto word list is in frequency order, and the two-minute Esperanto vocabulary test estimates how many of its words you already know. The Esperanto course, Verbavia (our own course), is free on the web and hand-written from the first lesson to C2. What the saving means in months is in how long it takes to learn Esperanto, and where Esperanto sits among other languages is in the easiest languages to learn for English speakers.

Sources

• The word lists are Verbavia's own: the frequency-ordered vocabulary of the Esperanto, Spanish, French, Italian and German courses, each entry with its English meanings. Both measurements are computed by scripts/frequency_screen.py and printed from its output rather than typed.
• How "looks like" is decided: Python's difflib.SequenceMatcher ratio between the word and the English word, after removing accents and, for Esperanto, the final grammatical vowel; a pair counts as alike at 0.72 or above. Meanings shorter than four letters are left out.
• Wennergren, B. Plena Manlibro de Esperanta Gramatiko (PMEG), on the word-class endings and the affixes: the prefix MAL and the suffix IĜ. bertilow.com
• Wikipedia: Esperanto vocabulary, on the sources of the roots and the system of affixes.