Printable Spanish frequency chart: top 100 words

Here are the 100 most common Spanish words on one page, each with its English meaning, ready to print. Use the button to print the chart straight from this page, or download the PDF, which is a single A4 sheet. The hundred words are counted in 423 million words of Spanish film and television dialogue, and together they make up 50.7% of everything said.

Updated 13 October 2026 · 6 min read

Free to print, copy and hand out, in a classroom or anywhere else. If you publish it, please link to this page.

How to print it

• From this page: press "Print the chart". Only the chart prints, in four columns, laid out to fit one sheet of A4 or US Letter. If your printer's margins push it onto a second sheet, use the PDF.
• As a PDF: the download is one A4 page with the same hundred words in the same order. It prints at full size on A4 and fits US Letter with "fit to page" ticked.
• On a phone: open the PDF and use your phone's share menu to print or save it.

What is on the chart

The words are in order of how often they are said, reading down each column: de is first, que second, no third. The number beside each word is its rank.

So one sheet of paper holds half of spoken Spanish, by count. It does not hold half of the meaning. Nearly everything on the chart is grammar: articles, pronouns, prepositions and verb forms. The only everyday nouns are vez, verdad, casa and tiempo. The words that say what a sentence is about come later in the list, and there are thousands of them.

Three things to notice as you read it:

• 27 of the hundred are verb forms, and most belong to six verbs: ser, estar, haber, tener, ir and poder. Es, soy, eres, son, era, fue and ser are all one verb. The chart lists them as separate words because that is how you will meet them.
• Accents change the word. Si is "if" and sí is "yes"; tu is "your" and tú is "you"; el is "the" and él is "he"; que is "that" and qué is "what". All eight are on the chart.
• Solo is there twice. Sólo with an accent is the older spelling of "only"; the Real Academia now recommends solo without it in nearly every case. Subtitles use both, so both are counted.

Why no is the third commonest word in the language, and how that compares with seven other languages, is explained in the most common Spanish words, which goes through the first fifty one group at a time.

How to use a frequency chart

A chart like this is a checklist, not a course. It works best in three ways.

1. As a first-week target. These are the words to recognise instantly before anything else. Cover the English column and work down.
2. On the wall. Put it where you study. When a sentence defeats you, the word you are missing is usually not on this sheet, and seeing that is useful: it tells you the gap is vocabulary further down the list, not grammar.
3. With a verb table beside it. The chart shows you tengo, tiene and tienes as three words. A table of tener shows you they are one. The verbs worth a table first are ranked in the 100 most common Spanish verbs.

What it cannot do is teach you the words in use. Lo, se and le each take a lesson to explain, and por and para take a page of their own; so do ser and estar.

After the first hundred

The next step is the next nine hundred. The 1,000 most common Spanish words are free, in the order our course teaches them, with their own printable PDF and a file for Excel or Anki. That list is ordered for learning, so it begins with hola and the pronouns; this chart is ordered purely by count, which is why the two do not match word for word.

The Spanish course, Verbavia (our own course), teaches from that list a lesson a day, with the grammar explained in English, free on the web, and the two-minute Spanish vocabulary test estimates how many words you already know. If the chart looks short, Spanish words you already know counts the thousands of longer words an English speaker can read on sight, and how many words you need to speak Spanish says how far past the first hundred you have to go.

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), content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. The ranks and shares are computed by scripts/frequency_basics.py and printed from its output rather than typed; the chart and the PDF are made from the same rows. The meanings are written for this page.
• Real Academia Española, Diccionario panhispánico de dudas: tilde, on writing solo without an accent.