French word frequency lists

We are providers of high-quality word frequency lists in French (and many other languages). The lists are generated from an enormous authentic database of text (text corpora) produced by real users of French. Our largest French corpus contains texts with a total length of 9,000,000,000 words.

Data quality

A relatively small corpus is sufficient to generate a list of the 2,000 most frequent French words, or the list of 3,000 words or 5,000 words because such words appear frequently enough in any text and correct frequency ranking can be achieved from a small sample of text.

However, an enormous text database (corpus) is required to ensure reliable word frequency information for rare and infrequently used words. The only viable option of building corpora of billions of words is an automatic approach of downloading content from the web. Lexical Computing developed a sophisticated procedure for collecting only linguistically valuable content from the web. A series of tools is used to focus on the right content and to perform deduplication and cleaning. This ensures that the statistics are not skewed. This blog post gives more details.

Wordlist size

The Fench word lists we are able to generate can reach a size of millions of unique words. The actual size depends on the specifications. By default, we will not include any word which appears fewer than 5 times in the corpus. Such words are typically noise without any linguistic value. The client can specify a multitude of filtering options.

Enriched frequency wordlists


We can also provide additional data such as collocations, example sentences, synonyms, spelling variants and other types of linguistic data.

Regional varieties

The frequency list can be generated from the whole corpus or only from its parts. Each document in the corpus carries information about the top-level domain (TLD) from which it was downloaded, for example .fr, .ca or .dz. This information can be used to generate frequency lists of regional varieties of French.

Wordlist sample


Wordlist prices


Wordlist download


French word frequency list

Some random words from the frequency list of French word forms with part-of-speech tags. The list can be supplied in various formats and enriched with statistical, morphological and other linguistic information.

French word frequency list sample

Download a spreadsheet with a sample of the last 100 words in each thousand between 1,000 and 100,000. The list is case insensitive and was converted to lowercase. Lists with specific criteria and filtering options can be generated to your requirements.