COCA · one billion words
The 100 Most Common English Nouns
Nouns are what English sentences are about. These are the 100 most frequent in a one-billion-word corpus of real American English — the things, people and ideas the language keeps coming back to.
Do more with this list
Tick a word to mark it as known — your tally sits at the bottom of the screen. Saved in this browser — create a free account to keep it across devices.
The list, ranked by frequency
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Test yourself
Reading a list is not the same as knowing it. Answer 10 questions drawn at random from these 100 words and find out which ones you only recognise.
Why these 100 nouns first
The list is ordered by raw corpus frequency, not by theme. That is why it looks nothing like the vocabulary sets in a coursebook: there is no food chapter and no travel chapter, because the nouns English actually repeats are abstract and general — time, way, thing, part, point.
Concrete, picturable nouns turn out to be surprisingly rare at the top. You have to go a long way down before reaching anything you could photograph. That gap between what is easy to illustrate and what is genuinely frequent is one of the most useful things a frequency list can show a learner.
Common English nouns explained
Nouns make up the largest word class in English by far — hundreds of thousands of them — which means no individual noun can be as frequent as a word like 'the'. What the top of this list shows instead is which nouns escaped that dilution: the handful general enough to appear in almost any sentence, on any subject.
Look at the first twenty and a pattern appears. Time, people, year, way, thing, man, day, life. Almost none of them name a physical object. They name units of time, categories of person, and abstractions so broad they are nearly grammatical. 'Thing' in particular functions less as a noun than as a placeholder for one — which is exactly why it earns its rank.
This has a practical consequence for study. Picture-based vocabulary learning works well for concrete nouns and badly for these, because there is nothing to draw. The words at the top of this list are learned through use — through the phrases they live in, like 'at the same time', 'in a way', 'the thing is'. That is why every entry here carries an example sentence rather than an image.
Treat the ranking as a diagnostic. Most learners recognise all hundred of these words and can still only use half of them precisely. Tick the ones you could produce correctly in a sentence of your own, not the ones you have merely seen before — the gap between those two numbers is the honest measure of where you are.
Frequently asked questions
How were these 100 nouns chosen?
They are the 100 highest-ranked nouns in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), a one-billion-word corpus. We filtered the corpus frequency list down to entries tagged as nouns and took the top 100 in order — nothing was hand-picked.
Why are so many of these words abstract?
Because abstract nouns are reusable. 'Time', 'way' and 'thing' fit almost any topic, so they appear constantly, while a concrete noun like 'spoon' only turns up when someone is talking about cutlery. Frequency rewards words that work everywhere.
Some words here are also verbs. Which one is being counted?
Only the noun. Words like work, study, change and point are common as both, and the corpus counts each part of speech separately. The figure shown is the noun's frequency alone, which is why a word can appear on more than one ranking with different numbers.
Are plurals counted separately?
No. Each entry is a lemma, so 'child' covers children and 'person' covers people where they share a headword. You learn one entry and get its forms with it.
Is this enough vocabulary to read a newspaper?
Not on its own, but it is the right foundation. These nouns plus the top verbs and adjectives cover the skeleton of most texts; the rest is topic vocabulary you pick up faster once the skeleton is solid.
Practise these words
Other rankings
Frequency data from www.wordfrequency.info, derived from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). wordfrequency.info