The most common Chinese words, 501 to 1,000

What is the most common Chinese word?

的 (de), which marks possession and description, like ’s or “of”: about one word in 18 on a Chinese web page. Then come 了 (le), 是 (shì, to be), 在 (zài, at) and 我 (wǒ, I).

How many Chinese words do you need to know?

The 100 most common words make up 31% of the words on a Chinese web page, the top 500 48% and the top 1,000 56%. The rest is spread over tens of thousands of words, which is why reading real Chinese is how the next thousands stick.

Where does this count come from?

Our own count of millions of pages of Chinese web text (FineWeb-2), read word by word by our parser, Simplified Chinese only. Each word links to its page with real sentences.

More of the list

• The top 100
• 101 to 500
• The most common characters
• Words by topic