Spanish words you already know: 2,700 cognates

If you read English, you can already read thousands of Spanish words. In our 18,344-word Spanish frequency list, 841 words are spelt exactly as their English meaning is, accents aside, and another 1,920 differ only by one of 16 regular endings, such as -ción for -tion and -dad for -ty. Count the looser lookalikes as well and 41.8% of the list is recognisable on sight. Words like these, which two languages share because they come from the same source, are called cognates.

Updated 13 October 2026 · 7 min read

Spanish words spelt the same as English

These need no learning at all on the page. Twenty of the 841, all from our list:

general, social, final, director, real, total, interior, idea, hospital, hotel, animal, radio, doctor, color, normal, central, natural, local, error and horror.

Some are among the commonest words in the language: general is number 130 in our list, social number 201 and idea number 415.

They are the same on paper only. Spanish says every vowel fully and puts the stress in its own place: hospital is os-pee-TAL, with a silent h, and idea has three syllables, ee-DEH-ah. Learn them by ear as well, or you will read them correctly and not catch them when they are said.

Sixteen endings that turn English into Spanish

Most shared words are not identical. They differ at the end, and they differ in the same way every time. Learn the ending once and a whole family of words comes with it.

The count beside each ending is the number of words in our list that follow it and mean what the English word means. -ción → -tion is the biggest by far, with 449 words.

Three of the endings carry grammar with them, which makes them worth more than their count:

• Nouns in -ción and -sión are feminine: la situación, la ocasión.
• Nouns in -dad are feminine too: la ciudad, la universidad.
• The ending -mente makes an adverb from the feminine form of an adjective, exactly as -ly does in English: total gives totalmente, directa gives directamente.

The rules work in both directions. If you need a Spanish word you have not learned and the English one ends in -tion, -ty or -ly, the regular Spanish ending is a good guess. It is a guess: check it before you rely on it.

How much of Spanish do cognates cover?

Less at the top of the list than further down.

In the first 1,000 words, 36.4% are recognisable; by the first 5,000 it is 43.3%. The reason is what the commonest words are. The top of any frequency list is small grammatical words, de, que, no, la, el, and none of those looks like English. The shared words are the longer, later ones: situación, importante, universidad.

That has a practical consequence. The words you already know are mostly not the words that hold a sentence together. Spanish is easy to read at the level of a newspaper headline long before it is easy to follow in conversation, because conversation runs on the short words. The hundred commonest are on the printable Spanish frequency chart, and almost none of them is a cognate.

Is this more than other languages offer? We put the same question to five languages at once in is Esperanto vocabulary really easier: for the same everyday meanings, Spanish, Italian and Esperanto words look like English about equally often, French more often, and German less.

Why English and Spanish share so many words

Spanish comes from Latin. English does not, but it took in Latin words in very large numbers, first through French after the Norman conquest and later straight from Latin for learning, law, medicine and science. So the two languages share a vocabulary that neither borrowed from the other. That is also why the shared words are formal-sounding in English: situation, necessary, frequency. English usually has a plain Germanic word beside the Latin one, need beside necessity, and it is the Latin one that Spanish recognises.

A smaller group travelled the other way: words English took from Spanish itself, such as patio and siesta. Those are in Spanish words used in English.

The ones that look familiar and are not

A cognate that has changed its meaning is a false friend, and Spanish has some famous ones. These are from our count of false friends ranked by how often you will meet them, with how often each is said per million words of Spanish film and television dialogue:

The famous ones are the rare ones. Embarazada and carpeta are in every list of traps, and a learner will meet recordar and ropa far more often. False friends are a small share of the lookalikes, but they are the reason a cognate is a strong hint and not a translation.

How we counted

• The list is Verbavia's own Spanish frequency list, 18,344 entries, each with its English meanings. It includes forms of words (plurals, verb forms, feminine adjectives), so some families are counted more than once.
• Spelt the same means the Spanish word, with its accents removed, is one of the English meanings we give for it.
• Follows an ending means the word has the Spanish ending, one of its English meanings has the matching English ending, and what is left of the two words is nearly the same.
• Looks alike otherwise is a fixed measure of shared letters in order between the word and one of its meanings. It is rough: it accepts some pairs a person would not call the same word and misses others. Treat the percentages as a guide to scale.
• Words shorter than four letters are left out, because short words match by accident.

Where to start

Start with the words you cannot guess. The 1,000 most common Spanish words are free and in frequency order, and the two-minute Spanish vocabulary test estimates how many you already know; expect the cognates to push your score up. The Spanish course, Verbavia (our own course), teaches from that list with the grammar explained, free on the web. What the rest of the language is like is in is Spanish hard to learn, and how far the same shared vocabulary reaches into Portuguese is in Portuguese vs Spanish.

Sources

• The counts are computed from Verbavia's Spanish word list by scripts/frequency_basics.py and printed from its output rather than typed. Every example on this page is checked against the list when the page is built.
• The false-friend rates 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.
• Wikipedia: Latin influence in English, on the routes by which Latin words entered English.