Click on any linked word for related grammar/info. *dass (ss) is word 261 **der Euro was put into circulation in Jan. 2002, so "Mark" (Deutsche Mark, DM) is probably less frequent now. See: Der Euro kommt
In the first 100 words, there are only five nouns, all of which have to do with money/figures or dates/time (Prozent, Mark, Uhr, Jahr/Jahren, Millionen), probably reflecting news content.
Since several simple past tense forms (Imperfekt, war, wurde, sagte) appear in the top 100, it might be better to introduce the past tense earlier in German instruction/learning.
A similar analysis of conversational German, as opposed to German in print, would yield very different results. However, reading is a very important language skill.
Zipf's Law seems to hold true: There is an inverse relationship between the length of a word and its frequency. (The most frequent words are monosyllabic. The longer the word, the less it's used, and vice versa.)
This list includes a lot of duplicates because it considers various spellings and capitalization of the same word to be different words. For a list that eliminates such duplicates, see the Top 100 Basic German Words (edited, ranked).
| 