The 100 most common French verbs, in order

A French frequency list does not tell you which verbs are most common, because it counts forms: est, suis, sont and était are four different rows, all of them être. To rank the verbs themselves, every form has to be put back under its infinitive and the counts added up. We did that for every verb in our French list, against 318 million words of French film and television dialogue. The method, and its limits, are below the list.

Updated 7 October 2026 · 10 min read

The ten that do most of the work

The top ten are être, avoir, aller, faire, dire, pouvoir, vouloir, savoir, devoir and voir. Together they account for 58.5% of all the verb forms we counted, and the top hundred for 84.4%.

• Être and avoir are far ahead of everything else, and not only because "to be" and "to have" are common ideas. They are also the auxiliaries of the past tense: j'ai mangé, je suis parti. Every passé composé in French contains one of them.
• Aller is third because it does double duty as the everyday future: je vais partir, "I'm going to leave", is how spoken French usually talks about what comes next.
• Four of the ten are usually followed straight by another verb: pouvoir, vouloir, savoir and devoir (je peux venir, je veux savoir, je sais nager, tu dois partir). Learn them early and each one opens a whole family of sentences.

The list

"Per million words" is how often the verb's forms, all added together, are said in the subtitle corpus. "First form in our list" is where the first of its forms appears in our list of the most common French words.

A few entries tell you what French speakers actually say. Falloir is 21st with a handful of forms, almost all of them il faut ("you have to", "we need"). Plaire is in the top fifty mostly because of s'il vous plaît and s'il te plaît. Arrêter is near the top, and its commonest form is arrête, "stop!"; tuer ("to kill") is there because subtitles come from film and television, where people are killed at a rate real life does not match.

How it was counted

Every form, generated. Unlike our Spanish list, our French list does not note which verb a form comes from, so every verb's forms were generated from hand-written conjugation rules — the regular -er, -ir and -re patterns with their spelling changes (commençons, mangeons, appelle, achète), and the irregular verbs from their principal parts. Every simple tense and mood is included, with the present participle and the past participle in all its spellings (pris, prise, prises). In all, 28,558 forms of 1,017 verbs were found in the corpus.

Words joined by a hyphen count for their verb. French writes some verb-and-pronoun pairs as one hyphenated token — est-ce, dis-moi, allez-y, avez-vous — and those are counted for the verb, as Spanish dime is counted for decir. The one exception is rendez-vous, which is a noun.

What was left out, and why. Many French verb forms are also everyday words of another kind, and a word count cannot tell them apart: tu is "you" and the past participle of taire; plus is "more" and a past tense of plaire; maintenant is "now" and a participle of maintenir; porte is "a door" and "carries". So any form our list gives first as something other than a verb was left out — tu, plus, maintenant, entre, pendant, puis, mort, reste, part, sens, porte and 848 forms in all that occur in the corpus. A form was kept only where the verb reading is plainly the usual one in speech, which we checked by hand: fait ("did", "done"), été ("been", though it is also "summer"), as ("you have").

Forms two verbs share were settled by hand where one reading dominates — suis is "I am" (être) far more than "I follow" (suivre) — and otherwise left out of both.

So every figure is a floor. Leaving a form out can only lower a verb's count. Verbs whose commonest forms double as other words — mourir (mort), porter (porte), rester (reste) — are the likeliest to be ranked too low, and the bottom of the table, where the counts are close, would shuffle under a different method.

What to do with this

• Learn the present-tense forms of the top ten as words in their own right. The commonest forms are est, a, va, fait, dit, peux, veux and sais; in speech you will meet them long before you need the infinitives.
• Learn avoir and être with a past participle attached. J'ai fait, j'ai dit, je suis allé — the past tense of spoken French is built from the top of this list.
• Use aller for the future. Je vais le faire is how French speakers say "I'll do it", and it needs no new endings.

French pays off fast: its first few hundred words cover more of speech than any other language we have measured, and how long it takes to learn French turns that into days. How many words you need to speak French explains why spoken and written French need different lists, and Spanish or French compares the two. The French course teaches French from its frequency list, verbs included, and the first 1,000 French words can be downloaded as a printable PDF or a CSV for Excel or Anki. The same ranking for Spanish is the 100 most common Spanish verbs.

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 conjugation rules are written by hand in scripts/french_verbs.py; the ranking is computed by french_verb_ranking in scripts/frequency_extras.py, where the forms kept and left out by hand are listed with their reasons, and printed from the output of scripts/frequency_curves.py rather than typed.