Random French word generator, by frequency level

Choose a level and press the button. Each word comes from our own French frequency list with its English meaning, and the level decides how common the word is: level 1–100 gives you the words in nearly every sentence, and level 2,001–5,000 gives you words an intermediate learner is still meeting. Tick the box to hide the meaning and test yourself.

Updated 13 October 2026 · 4 min read

The generator runs in your browser. Nothing you do on it is sent anywhere or stored, and it keeps working if your connection drops.

What the levels mean

The levels are positions in Verbavia's French list, which runs from the commonest word down to number 19,862. The generator draws on the first 5,000:

To put those levels in terms of real speech: in French film and television dialogue, the 100 commonest word forms cover 56.7% of everything said, the first 1,000 cover 79.4%, and the first 5,000 cover 90.1%. So a word from the first level is one you will hear every minute, and a word from the last is one you might hear once in a film. Those figures come from a count of subtitles, not from our list, and the two are ordered slightly differently, but the scale is the same.

Words are given in the form the list has them, so you will get verb forms such as avez ("you have") as well as dictionary forms, and nouns come with their gender. The 38 entries marked vulgar are left out.

Five ways to use a random word

A random word is a poor way to learn a language and a good way to practise one. These take a minute or two each.

1. Test yourself. Tick "hide the meaning", pick the level you are studying, and say the meaning before you reveal it. Ten words takes a minute. If you miss more than three, drop a level.
2. Make a sentence. Get a word and say one true sentence with it, out loud. A noun is easiest; a verb form makes you find its subject.
3. Say its gender. For a noun, say le or la before you look. French gender has to be learned with the word, and guessing it cold is the fastest way to find the ones you do not know.
4. Link two words. Draw two and make one sentence with both. It forces grammar out of you that a single word does not.
5. Find your level. Start at 1–100 and move up when the words stop surprising you. The level where you know about half is the one to study. For a proper estimate, the two-minute French vocabulary test samples the same list band by band, with made-up words mixed in to catch guessing.

Why by frequency?

A word chosen at random from a dictionary is almost always useless to a learner: most of a dictionary is rare words. A French dictionary has tens of thousands of entries, and a few thousand of them do nearly all the work in speech. Choosing a random word from a frequency level keeps the surprise and throws away the waste. Every word you draw from the first three levels is one you will need.

How steeply that works in French, where 64 word forms cover half of everything said, is in how many words you need to speak French. The hundred commonest forms, each explained, are in the 100 most common French words.

Want them in order instead?

A generator is for practice. To learn the words, take them in order: the 1,000 most common French words are free, with a printable PDF and a file for Excel or Anki. The French course, Verbavia (our own course), teaches from the same list, a lesson a day, with recordings and the grammar explained in English, free on the web. How big French is beyond any learner's list is in how many words there are in French.

Sources

• The words, meanings and genders are from Verbavia's own French frequency list; the first 1,000 are public at verbavia.com/words/french. The level sizes are computed by scripts/frequency_basics.py and printed from its output rather than typed.
• The coverage figures are from OpenSubtitles 2018 (Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J., 2016, aclanthology.org) through Hermit Dave's FrequencyWords lists, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, github.com, computed by scripts/frequency_curves.py.