The 100 most common Italian verbs, in order

The most common Italian verbs are essere (to be), avere (to have), fare (to do, to make), andare (to go), dire (to say), stare (to stay, to be), potere (can), sapere (to know), volere (to want) and dovere (must). We ranked them by adding up every form of each verb — sono, sei, è, era, sarà, sia all under essere, and words like dimmi ("tell me") under dire — across 247 million words of Italian film and television dialogue. The full hundred are below, with the rules we used for the forms that were hard to place.

Updated 7 October 2026 · 16 min read

The top ten, and the two that carry the grammar

Together the top ten account for 53.8% of all the verb forms we counted, and the top hundred for 84.0%. Two of them do far more than their meanings suggest.

Essere and avere are both auxiliaries. Every past tense in everyday Italian is built from one of them plus a past participle: ho mangiato ("I ate", with avere), sono andato ("I went", with essere). Transitive verbs take avere; most verbs of motion and change of state, and every reflexive verb, take essere. That is why avere sits second at 27,910 uses per million words, far ahead of fare at 12,680: possession is only part of its job.

Stare is sixth. It means "to stay", but in Italian it also does work English gives to "to be": come stai? ("how are you?"), sto bene ("I'm well"), and the progressive, sto lavorando ("I'm working"). Its commonest forms are sta, stai and sto.

Four of the ten are usually followed straight by an infinitive: potere, sapere, volere and dovere (posso venire, so nuotare, voglio sapere, devo andare). Learn their present tense early and each one doubles the number of sentences you can make.

Essere or avere: the counts show which

The choice of auxiliary is not only a matter of which verb you say. With essere, the past participle agrees with the subject like an adjective: a man says sono arrivato, a woman sono arrivata. With avere it normally stays in the masculine whoever is speaking — ho trovato, man or woman — and changes only to agree with an object pronoun in front of it (l'ho trovata, "I found her") or in a passive (è stata trovata, "she was found").

That difference is visible in a word count. Here is how often each verb's singular participle is said in its masculine and feminine form:

Across the seven essere verbs we measured, 34.3% of the singular participles are feminine; across the ten avere verbs, 6.4%. With essere, a feminine participle simply means the sentence is about a woman, so roughly a third of them are feminine. With avere, it takes a feminine object pronoun or a passive, and those are much rarer.

So the practical rule for a learner: when you learn a verb, learn which auxiliary it takes, and if it is essere, expect to hear its participle in two shapes.

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 verb, or the first of its forms, appears in our list of the most common Italian words.

What the list says about spoken Italian:

• Succedere is in the top 25 mostly through succede and successo — cos'è successo?, "what happened?", is one of the commonest questions in film dialogue.
• Scusare and pregare are there as politeness. Scusa and scusi are the informal and polite "sorry, excuse me", the imperative of scusare. Prego is "you're welcome", but in subtitles it is mostly ti prego or la prego, "please, I beg you" — literally "I pray you".
• Piacere and dispiacere work backwards. Mi piace ("I like it") is "it pleases me", and mi dispiace ("I'm sorry") is "it displeases me": the person who likes, or is sorry, is the indirect object. Both verbs live almost entirely in the third person, piace and dispiace.
• Pensare (12th) outranks credere (17th). Spanish speakers reach for creer before pensar; Italians say penso and credo both, but pensare wins once every form is added up. (Credo is still the single commonest form of either.)
• Uccidere and morire are in the top 35, and sparare ("to shoot") in the top 100. That is the corpus: film and television, where people are killed far more often than in real life.

Pronouns written onto the verb

The thing that makes counting Italian verbs harder than counting Spanish or French ones is also the thing a learner hears constantly: object pronouns joined to the end of the verb as one word. On an infinitive, a gerund or an imperative, Italian writes the pronoun on: farlo (to do it), dimmi (tell me), dammi (give me), fammi (let me, make me), lasciami (leave me), facendolo (doing it). Two pronouns stack — dimmelo, "tell me it" — and after the one-syllable imperatives da', di', fa', sta' and va' the pronoun's first consonant is written double: di' + mi is dimmi, va' + te + ne is vattene ("go away"). Gli does not double: digli, "tell him".

A word list counts each of those as a separate word. Farlo alone is said 609.6 times per million words, dimmi 198.1 and dammi 168.8. Counted under their verbs, words like these make up 7.1% of all the verb forms we counted — enough to move verbs up the table. Aiutare ("to help") is in the top 50 about half through aiutarti, aiutarmi and aiutami, and smettere ("to stop doing something") through smettila.

Some of these are verbs in their own right. Italian has a family of pronominal verbs whose pronouns change the meaning, and several are among the commonest words in speech:

We counted these under their base verb — vattene is andare, farcela is fare — because that is where a learner meets them: as a use of a verb they already know. But they have to be learned as items of their own. Nothing in fare tells you that ce la faccio means "I can do it".

How it was counted

Every form, generated. Our Italian course list does not say which verb a form belongs to, so every verb's forms were generated from hand-written conjugation rules: the three regular patterns with their spelling changes (cerchi, mangerò, finisco), and the irregular verbs from their principal parts, with their families (prendere and sorprendere, tenere and ottenere, porre and proporre). Every simple tense and mood is included, with the gerund and the past participle in its four spellings. The present participle is not counted: in Italian it is nearly always an adjective or a noun (importante, cantante). In all, 66,859 forms of 1,183 verbs were found in the corpus.

Pronouns joined to a verb were counted for that verb when the word splits exactly into an infinitive, gerund or imperative followed by a pronoun or a pair of pronouns, as described above. Words that only look like that were checked by hand and left out: animali is "animals", not anima + li; dettagli is "details"; sedici is "sixteen"; dagli is nearly always "from the", not "give him".

Apostrophes. The subtitle list splits words at the apostrophe, so c'è ("there is") is counted as è, under essere. Dev' (as in dev'essere, "it must be") is counted for dovere, 126.2 times per million words. And because a capital È is awkward to type, subtitles often write E' instead; that spelling alone adds 314.1 per million to essere. Puo' and sara' were treated the same way. Po' is poco, not a verb, and was left alone.

What was left out, and why. A word count cannot tell porta "door" from porta "carries", so a form that is also an everyday word of another kind was left out: parte, volta, posto, lavoro, conto, letto and 844 forms in all that occur in the corpus. Where it mattered we looked at the word said just before each form in the full subtitle text. That kept a few forms the rule would have dropped — successo (most often after è, so "happened", not "success"), scusa (mostly the sentence-opening "sorry"), prego (mostly ti prego), sia (mostly the subjunctive of essere) — and dropped a few it would have kept: vivo (mostly "alive"), calma ("calm!"), fermi ("freeze!"), giochi ("games"). The infinitives potere, dovere, piacere and parere were left out as words, because in speech they are mostly nouns: il potere (power), il mio dovere (my duty), piacere! ("pleased to meet you"), a mio parere (in my opinion). Their other forms — posso, devo, piace, pare — are all counted.

Stato belongs to two verbs. The past participle of essere is stato, the same word as the past participle of stare — è stato is "he has been", while sono stato a casa can be "I was at home" (essere) or "I stayed at home" (stare) — and stato is also "state". No word count can split those, so stato, stata, stati and state are counted for neither verb. Together they are said 3,410 times per million words, which would only widen essere's lead.

Sei is both "you are" and "six". It was kept for essere: in the full text it is mostly preceded by tu, non, che or dove and followed by un, qui or stato, and number contexts such as sei anni are a small minority.

So every figure is a floor. Leaving a form out can only lower a verb's count. The verbs whose forms double as other words — portare (porta), partire (parti, partito), vivere (vivo, viva) — are the likeliest to be ranked too low, and near the bottom of the table, where the counts are close, the order would shuffle a little under a different method. The top would not.

Italian against Spanish

The two lists start alike and then part ways in instructive places. Spanish has two verbs for "to be" near the top, ser and estar, and two for "to have", haber (the auxiliary) and tener (possession). Italian has one verb doing both jobs in each pair — essere and avere — which is why avere is second here where haber and tener are third and fourth in Spanish. Stare exists, but it is sixth, not second as estar is: Italian leaves most of "to be" to essere. Dovere is in the Italian top ten; its Spanish counterpart deber is outside the Spanish top ten. And Italian forms its past tense with essere for a whole class of verbs, which Spanish, using haber for everything (he ido, he comido), never does — so sono andato is a pattern a Spanish speaker has to learn from scratch.

What to do with this

• Learn the present tense of the top ten as words. The commonest forms are è, ho, fatto, va, detto, sta, posso, so, voglio and devo; you will hear them long before you need an infinitive.
• Learn each verb with its auxiliary. Ho fatto, ho detto, ho visto, but sono andato, sono venuto, sono stato. The participle of an essere verb changes with the speaker.
• Learn the joined-up forms as vocabulary. Dimmi, dammi, fammi, vattene, smettila and ce la faccio are among the commonest things said in Italian, and none of them looks like the dictionary entry it comes from.
• Follow a course that teaches verbs in frequency order. Verbavia (our own course) teaches Italian from its frequency list in hand-written lessons, with the grammar explained in English and reading, listening and writing sections; it is free on the web and works in any browser, including on a phone. The Italian course starts with these verbs.

Why Italian verbs are a large part of what makes the language take time is in is Italian hard to learn and how long it takes to learn Italian, and how many words you need to speak Italian shows how verb forms fill a frequency list. The two-minute Italian vocabulary test estimates how many of the words you already know. If you speak Spanish, can Spanish speakers understand Italian measures how much carries over; 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 words before and after the disputed forms were read from the full Italian OpenSubtitles 2018 text: OPUS, OpenSubtitles 2018.
• Wikipedia: Italian grammar — the choice of auxiliary, participle agreement with essere and with a preceding object pronoun, and pronouns joined to infinitives, gerunds and imperatives; Italian conjugation — the short imperatives da', di', fa', sta', stato as the participle of both essere and stare, and the -isc- verbs.
• Wiktionary: farcela, andarsene (with vattene and andiamocene), cavarsela, avercela, smetterla (with smettila and piantarla).
• The conjugation rules, the joined-pronoun rule and every form kept or left out by hand, with its reason, are in scripts/frequency_verbs_it.py; the figures are printed from its output in frequency_curves.json rather than typed.