The most common Spanish words: “no” is number 3

The three most common words in spoken Spanish are de (of, from), que (that, which) and no (no, not). In 423 million words of Spanish film and television dialogue, no comes third, at 29,246 times per million words: about one word in every 34. It is commoner than la, el and y. The first three words together make up 9.7% of everything said, and the fifty in the table below make up 42.2%. Below we explain why a word for "no" ranks so high, and how that compares with seven other languages.

Updated 16 October 2026 · 10 min read

Why "no" is so common in Spanish

Spanish does not say "no" more than other languages do. It puts all of its "no" work into one short word, and its grammar uses that word in places where English would not.

One word does the job of three English ones. English answers with no, negates with not, and in speech mostly uses n't: I don't know, it isn't, we can't. English can't put not straight onto an ordinary verb ("I know not" is archaic), so it adds do and usually shortens the pair to don't. Spanish just puts no in front of the verb: no sé ("I don't know"), no es ("it isn't"), no podemos ("we can't"). The same no is also the answer: No, gracias.

Spanish keeps "no" even when the sentence already has a negative word. No veo nada, literally "I don't see nothing", is ordinary Spanish for "I don't see anything". Linguists call this negative concord. Standard English doesn't do it. Where English says "he never comes" with a single negative, Spanish can say no viene nunca, with no in front as well.

It is also a tag question. Es tuyo, ¿no? is "it's yours, isn't it?" or "it's yours, right?". English builds a different tag for each sentence (isn't it, don't you, can't we). Spanish uses the same ¿no? or ¿verdad? whatever the sentence, and every ¿no? counts towards the total.

Dialogue is where people say no. These counts come from film and television subtitles, the closest large record of everyday talk, and in it characters answer, refuse, deny and correct each other all the time.

The first reason can be checked against the numbers. Add up English's three words for the job and English says them 24,860 times per million words. Spanish says no 29,246 times. Spanish still says it more often, but the gap is far smaller than the ranks suggest. The big difference is that English spreads the job over three words, so none of them climbs as high as Spanish's one.

Where "no" ranks in other languages

We read the same kind of list, film and TV subtitles counted word by word, for seven more languages. The rank is the word's place on its language's list; "per million" is how often it is said.

• Italian and Brazilian Portuguese put theirs second. Italian non ("not") is number 2, and Brazilian não ("no, not") is number 2. Italian also has a separate no for answers. Like Spanish, both languages use negative concord: Non vedo niente, Não vejo nada. So Spanish isn't unusual among its neighbours; in Spanish, de and que simply come out a little ahead of no.
• European Portuguese says não about as often as Brazil does, but its list puts it 4th.
• French splits the job. Written French negates with ne … pas, but speech often drops the ne, so pas is number 4 and ne is 17th. How much of French that dropped ne changes is covered in how many words you need for French.
• German puts nicht ("not") at number 6, with nein for the answer and kein/keine for "no, not a, not any".
• English comes highest with the n't of its contractions, number 10; the subtitle list counts don't as don plus 't. No and not are only 27th and 28th.
• Esperanto's ne is number 4, but its subtitle corpus has only 403,882 words, far too few for its ranks to be compared closely with the others.
• Mandarin has two words: 不 bù is the 9th commonest word, and 没有 méiyǒu negates "have" and things that have already happened. Counted as a character, 不 is sixth: see the 100 most common Chinese characters.

The 50 most common Spanish words

These are word forms, counted as written, so es and está are separate entries and sí ("yes") and si ("if") are separate words. "Running total" is how much of all Spanish dialogue the list covers up to that word.

What the top fifty tell you

Most of them are grammar, not content. Articles (el, la, los, las, un, una), prepositions (de, a, en, por, con, para), and the small pronouns me, te, se, lo and le fill most of the list. Hardly any of them has a clear English equivalent you could use on its own. You learn them by seeing them in sentences.

"I" is not near the top. In English subtitles I is number 2 and you is number 1. In Spanish yo is 30th and tú 56th. The verb ending already says who is speaking (tengo can only be "I have"), so Spanish can leave the pronoun out, and very often does.

Accents make different words. Sí (yes) and si (if) are almost exactly as common as each other, numbers 24 and 25. Qué (what?) is 13th, and que (that) is second. On the page, the written accent is what tells each pair apart.

Only a few verb forms make it. Es, está, estoy, ha, vamos and hay are the only verbs in the top fifty. Spanish verbs come in so many forms that each single form is rarer. All their forms added together are ranked in the 100 most common Spanish verbs.

Fifty words cover a lot, and say very little. 42.2% of what is said comes from this table. Even so, you could not follow a conversation knowing only these words. The rest of every sentence, the nouns and verbs that carry its meaning, is spread over thousands of rarer words. How many you need before dialogue makes sense is set out in how many words you need to speak Spanish.

How to learn them

• Learn "no" in phrases. No sé, no pasa nada, no hay, ¿no?: knowing where the word sits does more than knowing what it means.
• Learn the small words in sentences, not in isolation. Lo, se and le have no one-word translation. They make sense after you've seen them in a few sentences.
• Then move down the list. The next few thousand words are where the meaning is, and frequency order gets you to the useful ones first.

Verbavia (our own course) teaches Spanish in frequency order, with the grammar explained in English, and reading, listening and writing sections in hand-written lessons. The Spanish course is free on the web in any browser, including on a phone. You can browse the 1,000 most common Spanish words, or take the two-minute Spanish vocabulary test to estimate how many of them you already know. The Spanish words English has borrowed, and what they mean at home, are in Spanish words used in English.

Caveats

• Word forms, not dictionary words. La is both "the" and "her", and se does several jobs. Each form is counted once, whatever it is doing.
• Accents are as the subtitlers typed them. A subtitle that leaves out the accent turns sí into si, so the two counts are close but not exact.
• One kind of Spanish. Subtitles are close to conversation, and some are translations of films first made in other languages.
• Ranks in other languages come from their own corpora, which differ in size; a rank compares well, a small difference in "per million" does not.

The hundred commonest words fit on one sheet: the printable Spanish frequency chart is free to print or download.

Two sets every beginner needs early are written out in full: numbers 1 to 100 in Spanish and the days of the week in Spanish.

The same count of the top hundred is published for three more languages: Italian, German 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 (es, it, pt_br, pt, fr, de, en, eo, zh_cn), content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com
• Wikipedia: Do-support — English not attaches only to an auxiliary, so "I do not (don't) know"; the -n't contractions.
• Wikipedia: Double negative — No veo nada, Não vejo nada, Non vedo niente for "I don't see anything"; standard English has no negative concord; French ne … pas.
• Wikipedia: Tag question — Spanish ¿no? and ¿verdad?, Italian no?.
• Wikipedia: French grammar — colloquial French commonly drops ne.
• Wiktionary: kein — "no; not a(n); not one; not any".
• Wikipedia: Chinese grammar — 没 / 没有 for negating 有 and completed events, 不 elsewhere.
• Wikipedia: Pro-drop language — Spanish can leave out subject pronouns because the verb shows person and number; English cannot.
• Verbavia's Spanish word list, for the meanings. The ranks, rates and running totals are computed by scripts/frequency_top.py in Verbavia's repository and printed from its output rather than typed.