Lextutor

Lextutor is a Canadian vocabulary site for researchers, instructors and students. Amongst many other useful tools, you can test your vocabulary knowledge of the most frequent words in English to the level of 14,000.

In the tests, you'll see references to K1 and K2. K1 refers to the most frequent 1000 words in English; K2 to the next most frequent 1000 words, and so on. What's the significance of this then? Take a look at the figures below. Basically, the first 1000 words in English are so common that they make up an average of 79.7% of any text you read. After that word families get less frequent and as a result harder to learn. But note that the 6000 mark has still not hit 90% - some way from the magic 95% number. Here's the link to the tests.


86,741   100 %
43,831  99.0
 6,000  89.9

 5,000  88.6

 4,000  86.7 
 3,000  84
 2,000  79.7
 1,000  72.0
 10  23.7