The 100 most common German verbs, in order

The most common German verbs are sein (to be), haben (to have) and werden (to become, and the helper behind the future and the passive), followed by können, wollen, wissen, sagen, müssen, machen and gehen. Those ten make up 51.2% of all the verb forms we counted in 156 million words of German film and television dialogue, and the top hundred make up 81.7%. The full list is below. German is harder to count than Spanish or French, for three reasons the list has to deal with: verbs that split in two, verbs that look exactly like nouns, and the three verbs at the top doing grammar rather than meaning.

Updated 7 October 2026 · 15 min read

Why German verbs are hard to count

A frequency list counts word forms, so ist, bin, war and gewesen are four separate rows, all of them sein. Putting forms back under their verb is the job in every language. German adds three problems of its own:

• Some verbs come in two pieces. Wie siehst du denn aus? ("What do you look like?") contains the verb aussehen, but the word a frequency list sees is siehst, which looks like sehen, "to see". Whenever such a verb is the main verb of a main clause, its prefix goes to the end of the clause.
• Some verbs are spelled exactly like nouns. leben is "to live" and Leben is "life"; frage is "I ask" and Frage is "a question". German writes the noun with a capital letter, but frequency lists are lowercased, so the two are merged.
• The most common verbs are mostly grammar. haben and sein build the past tense people use in speech (Ich habe es gesagt, Er ist gegangen), and werden builds the future and the passive. Their counts measure how often German needs a helper verb, not how often anyone talks about having or becoming.

We solved the first two by going back to the full subtitle text, 220 million words with the capital letters and the word order intact. The method is set out below the list.

The top three are doing grammar

Together, sein, haben and werden are 34.5% of every verb form we counted. To see how much of that is grammar, we looked at what else was in the same clause:

• About half of every haben is the perfect tense. A form of haben next to a past participle — hast du gegessen?, ich hab's vergessen — is the helper of the spoken past, and that is 49.7% of the clauses with haben in them. The rest is mostly haben meaning "have": ich habe keine Zeit.
• Sein is mostly "is". Only 8.5% of its clauses have a participle in them (er ist gekommen, and states like ich bin verletzt). The other nine-tenths are ist, bin and war doing the ordinary work of "to be", which is why it is so far ahead of everything else.
• About half of werden is the future and "would". Next to an infinitive it makes the future (er wird kommen) or, as würde, "would" (ich würde gehen); that is 50.8% of its clauses. Next to a participle it makes the passive (das Haus wird verkauft), 15.5%. The rest is werden meaning "become" (es wird kalt), along with short replies with no second verb. Würde and its forms alone are 17.7% of everything werden is counted for.

These are clause-by-clause estimates, not a full grammatical analysis: a clause was taken to end at a comma, a full stop, und, oder or aber, and the other verbs in it were recognised by their spelling.

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 German words.

The modal verbs

Five of the top twenty are modal verbs, the ones that take another verb without zu: können, wollen, müssen, sollen and mögen, with dürfen further down. Together the six are 10.6% of all the verb use we counted. Each of them puts its second verb at the end of the clause — Ich kann heute nicht kommen — so a learner who has them can say a great deal with only infinitives after them.

Mögen is a special case. Its commonest form is not mag ("like") but möchte, "would like", which grammar books describe as its Konjunktiv II and learners meet as a verb of its own (Ich möchte einen Kaffee). Möchte and its forms are 59.0% of mögen's count; without them it would fall well out of the top twenty.

The verbs that come in two pieces

A separable verb splits whenever it is the main verb of a main clause: Hör mir zu! is zuhören, "to listen", and Komm her! is herkommen, "to come here". With a helper verb, or at the end of a subordinate clause, it is one word again: Du musst zuhören, weil er nicht zuhört.

For a frequency count that means the commonest verbs are partly borrowed. Here is how much of each base verb's count turned out to be half of a separable verb, once split clauses were put back together:

Read the other way round, some separable verbs are said mostly in their split form. 86.1% of every zuhören in the corpus is a split one (hör zu, hören Sie zu), and so is 76.0% of aussehen (du siehst gut aus). Counted only as whole words, aussehen would be lost far down the list; counted properly it is number 38 on the list. In all, 9 of the top hundred are separable verbs.

How it was counted

Every form, generated, then checked against our list. Every verb in our German course list was conjugated in full: present, simple past, both subjunctives, the imperative and the past participle, with the vowel changes of the strong verbs (gibt, gab, gegeben) written out by hand, and for separable verbs the joined forms (anrufen, angerufen, anzurufen, dass er anruft). Our list already notes which verb more than a thousand of its forms belong to, and the count refuses to run if any of those is missing from what the rules produce. In all, 9,147 forms of 777 verbs were found in the corpus. Each form's count comes from the same lowercased subtitle word list as everything else on this blog.

Capital letters split the nouns from the verbs. For every form, we looked up how often it was written in lower case in the middle of a sentence — where a capital means a noun — and counted that share as the verb. It matters: leben is in lower case only 21.1% of the time (the rest is Leben, "life"), frage 28.5% (Frage, "question"), while wissen is lower case 97.6% of the time. At the start of a sentence a capital means nothing, so those occurrences were shared out in the same proportion.

Split verbs were rejoined clause by clause. When a clause ended in a separable prefix (an, auf, aus, mit, zu, her, zurück and so on), the nearest verb before it was counted for the separable verb — but only if that separable verb exists. Was ist los? stays with sein, because there is no verb lossein; Was hast du vor? goes to vorhaben. Particles that do not form a verb with the one before them, like los after ist or weg after muss, were left with the verb as written.

What was left out, and why. Some forms are also a common word of another kind, written in lower case, so no capital letter separates them. Those were left out: meine and meinen (also "my"), bitte ("please") and danke ("thanks") although they are also forms of bitten and danken, halt (also the filler "just"), mal ("once", a filler again), dank ("thanks to") and schuld (ich bin schuld, "it's my fault"). Sein is both "to be" and "his", and was counted as the verb only when it was the last word in its clause, where an infinitive can stand and "his" cannot: Das kann sein, but not Sein Bruder ist hier. On that rule 69.4% of every sein is the verb. Liebe and lieben are also an adjective (liebe Grüße), and were counted as the verb only next to a pronoun (ich liebe dich) or at the end of a clause. Forms that belong to two common verbs were left out of both: gehört is "heard" and "belongs", gefallen is "fallen" and "to please".

So every figure is a floor. Leaving a form out can only lower a verb's count. Meinen, lieben and gefallen are the most likely to be ranked too low. Two things go the other way: weiß ("I know") was kept under wissen although it also means "white", and past participles used as adjectives (verletzt, "injured") count for their verb, unless our list files them as an adjective, because a word count cannot tell the two uses apart.

One corpus, one register. Subtitles are the nearest large corpus to everyday speech, but they are film and television, which is why töten ("to kill") and sterben ("to die") are both in the top fifty.

What to do with this

• Learn haben and sein with a participle attached. Ich habe gesagt, ich bin gegangen: spoken German talks about the past this way, so about half of all haben use is this one pattern.
• Learn separable verbs with both halves, from the start. Aussehen is said mostly as sieht … aus, and someone who has only met the infinitive will not hear it. Learn Wie siehst du aus?, Hör zu! and Fang an! as phrases.
• Learn the six modals early. Können, wollen, müssen, sollen, dürfen and möchte plus an infinitive are one in ten of all the verb forms in German speech, and they let a beginner use every other verb in its dictionary form.

Separable verbs and the verb-second rule are a large part of why German grammar takes time; is German hard to learn and how long it takes to learn German put the two side by side with genders and cases, and how many words you need to speak German does the same for vocabulary. You can check where you stand with the German vocabulary test, and the German course teaches from the same frequency list, verbs included. The first 1,000 German words can be downloaded as a printable PDF or a CSV for Excel or Anki. The same ranking for other languages: the 100 most common Spanish verbs and the 100 most common French verbs.

Sources

• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• OPUS: the German OpenSubtitles 2018 monolingual text, read in full with capitals and word order intact. object.pouta.csc.fi
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com.
• Wikipedia: Separable verb — the particle goes to the end of a main clause (Sie kommt sofort an) and stays attached with an auxiliary (Sie ist sofort angekommen).
• Wikipedia: German conjugation — the perfect with haben or sein, the preterite "usually avoided when speaking", the future and the passive with werden, and the conditional with würde.
• Wiktionary: möchte — "first/third-person singular subjunctive II of mögen".
• The conjugation rules, the forms kept and left out by hand with their reasons, and the clause rules are all in scripts/frequency_verbs_de.py; every figure is printed from its output rather than typed.