The 100 most common Spanish verbs, in order

Most lists of "the most common Spanish verbs" are either a textbook's opinion or a frequency list of word forms with the verbs picked out, where es, está and tengo each count as a different word. This list is neither. We took every form of every verb — soy, eres, es, era, será, sea all under ser — added up how often each is said in 423 million words of Spanish film and television dialogue, and ranked the verbs by the total. The method, and what it leaves out, is set out below the list.

Updated 7 October 2026 · 9 min read

The ten that do most of the work

The top ten are ser, estar, haber, tener, ir, poder, hacer, decir, saber and querer. Every one of them is irregular, and together they account for 58.1% of all the verb forms we counted. The top hundred account for 89.4%.

Three things about them are worth knowing before the list:

• Two verbs for "to be" come first and second. Ser (what something is) and estar (how or where it is) together outnumber every other verb, and the choice between them is one of the first real decisions a learner makes.
• Haber is third, and hardly anyone lists it. It is the auxiliary of the perfect tenses (he comido, "I have eaten") and the "there is" of hay, so it is everywhere without ever meaning much on its own.
• Creer outranks pensar. Spanish speakers say creo ("I think, I believe") far more often than pienso; both can mean "I think", and the list shows which one people actually reach for.

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 Spanish words.

How it was counted

Which forms belong to which verb. Our Spanish course list notes, for each verb form, the verb it comes from: fue is "preterite of ir; preterite of ser", hay is "impersonal present of haber". Every verb's forms were gathered from those notes, reflexive infinitives were counted with their verb (quedarse under quedar), and each form's count was taken from the subtitle word list. In all, 5,954 forms of 1,146 verbs were counted.

What was left out, and why. A word count cannot tell casa "house" from casa "he marries", so a form that is also an everyday word of another kind was left out — casa, acuerdo, fuera, estado, vale, pasado and many more. A form was kept only where the verb reading is plainly the usual one in speech, which we checked by hand: era ("was"; era "an era" is rare), mira ("look!"), oye ("listen!"), pienso ("I think"). Forms that belong to two common verbs were left out of both: ven is "they see" and "come!", di is "I gave" and "say!".

Ser and ir share a past tense. Fue is both "was" and "went", and so are fui, fueron and the rest of the preterite and imperfect subjunctive. No word count can split them, so they are counted for neither verb. Together they are said about 2,556 times per million words, which would only strengthen ser at the top, and could lift ir above tener.

So every figure is a floor. Forms that were left out, or that are missing from our list, can only make a verb's real count higher. The ranks near the bottom of the table are close together and would move a little under a different method; the top of it would not.

One corpus, one register. Subtitles are the closest large corpus to everyday speech, but they are film and television — which is why matar ("to kill") is in the top hundred, and why the list may overstate crime and understate shopping.

What to do with this

• Learn the forms, not just the infinitives. The commonest form of ir is vamos, of saber it is sé, and of querer it is quiero. A learner who knows the infinitive but not those may not recognise them in speech.
• Learn the top ten first, and thoroughly. They are over half of all the verb use we counted; every tense of them will come up.
• Notice the verbs that work backwards. Gustar (me gusta, "I like it") and importar (no me importa, "I don't care") are both in the top fifty, and both put the person who likes or cares in the object position.

Verbs are the hard part of Spanish for most English speakers; is Spanish hard to learn explains why, and how many words you need to speak Spanish shows how verb forms fill up a frequency list. The Spanish course teaches Spanish from its frequency list, verbs included, and the first 1,000 Spanish words can be downloaded as a printable PDF or a CSV for Excel or Anki. The same ranking for French is 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
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com.
• Verbavia's Spanish word list, for which forms belong to which verb. The ranking is computed by spanish_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.