The 100 most common English verbs, in order

The most common English verbs are be, do, have, go, get, know, come, want, think and see. We ranked them by adding up every form of each verb, so is, was, are and 'm all count for be, across 735 million words of English film and television dialogue. Below are the 100 most common English verbs in order, with their past tense and past participle, the modal verbs ranked on their own, and the rules we used.

Updated 15 October 2026 · 4 min read

The top ten, and what they have in common

Nine of the ten commonest verbs are irregular: only want forms its past with -ed. Together the top ten account for 63.0% of all the uses of the hundred verbs in the list.

Be is in a class of its own. It is used 3.5 times as often as have, the third verb, and it is undercounted even so, because the 's of it's and he's could be is or has and is left out.

Do is second because English needs it to ask and to deny. Do you know?, I don't know, didn't he?: English cannot put not straight onto most verbs, so do is added, and the don of don't is counted here.

Go and get are the busiest ordinary verbs. Get in particular does the work of dozens of more precise verbs: get up, get it, get married, get home. Go includes gonna, which is 19.8% of all its uses on screen.

The 100 most common English verbs

"Regular" in the past columns means the verb adds -ed: wanted, looked. A note "also another kind of word: a ceiling" marks a verb whose spelling is also a noun or an adjective, so its count includes those uses too: love, work, call and look are as much nouns as verbs.

The modal verbs

Can, will, would and the rest work differently from other verbs. They have no -s form, no -ing form and, for most, no past of their own, so they are ranked separately.

Will is first, with 'll and the won of won't counted for it, and can second. Shall is rare in dialogue, at 223.4 per million words, about a thirtieth as often as will.

What the list tells a learner

Learn the irregular pasts first. 53 of the hundred are irregular, and they are the ones at the top. A learner who knows went, got, knew, came, thought, saw, said, took, told and made has the past tense of most of what is said.

Learn the phrasal verbs as single words. The list counts get once, but get up, get out and get over mean different things. The verbs at the top are the ones that combine most.

Contractions are the normal form. I'm, don't, I've and I'll are how these verbs are said. Textbook I am and do not are for emphasis.

How it was counted

• Source. The English list from FrequencyWords, which counts every word in the OpenSubtitles 2018 collection of film and television subtitles.
• Every form, added up. Each verb's base form, -s form, past, past participle and -ing form are counted for it. A spelling shared by two verbs is counted for neither.
• Contractions. The counts split words at the apostrophe. The pieces that can only be one verb are counted for it: 'm and 're for be, 've for have, don and didn for do. Two cannot: 's (is, has or possessive) and 'd (would or had) are left out.
• Spoken forms. Gonna is counted for go, wanna for want and gotta for get.
• Left out because they are usually something else. Like (as in "like this"), left (the direction), own (my own), lives (the plural of life), drunk (the adjective) and won (the start of won't). So like, leave and win are undercounted.
• Captions for deaf viewers describe sounds, so laughs and screaming appear in subtitle files without being said, and are left out.
• Subtitles are not street recordings. Film and television dialogue is written to sound like speech, and it has more shooting and killing in it than most people's days: kill and shoot both make the hundred.

The same count in other languages

The same method, every form added up under its infinitive, ranks the verbs of five other languages: Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese. In every one, the verb "to be" is first. All the words of English, verbs and others, are ranked in the 1,000 most common English words.

Verbavia (our own course) teaches those five languages to English speakers, verbs included, in the order they are used, free on the web: Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese.

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. The ranking is computed by scripts/frequency_verbs_en.py in Verbavia's repository and printed from its output rather than typed.
• Wikipedia: Do-support and English modal auxiliary verb.