COCA · one billion words
The 100 Most Common English Verbs
Verbs carry the meaning of almost every English sentence, and a very small number of them do most of the work. These are the 100 most frequent verbs in a one-billion-word corpus of real American English — the ones you will meet on your first day of reading and still be using at C1.
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 verbs first
This list is ordered by raw corpus frequency, not by what a textbook thinks you should learn first. That is deliberate: frequency is the one ordering that reflects what English speakers actually say and write, rather than what is convenient to teach.
A few entries may surprise you. Modal verbs like can, will, would and could appear high on the list because the corpus tags them as verbs — they are not separated out. They are genuinely among the most common verbs in English, so we have left them where the data puts them.
Common English verbs explained
English vocabulary is heavily front-loaded. A handful of verbs appear so often that they shape the rhythm of the language: be, have, do, say, go and get together account for a striking share of every conversation, news report and novel. Learning them properly — all their forms, their common patterns, the prepositions that follow them — pays back far more than memorising rarer words.
The verbs at the top of this list are also the most irregular, which is not a coincidence. Linguists have long observed that the most frequently used verbs resist regularisation: because speakers hear them constantly, irregular forms like went, said and took survive where rarer verbs drift towards regular -ed endings. That means the highest-frequency verbs are exactly the ones worth drilling as forms, not just as meanings.
Frequency is not the same as simplicity. Verbs such as set, hold, run and turn are common precisely because they are used in dozens of senses and in many phrasal combinations. A learner who knows only one meaning of 'get' will still be lost in half the sentences it appears in. That is why every entry here carries a definition and an example sentence rather than a bare translation.
Use this ranking as a checklist rather than a syllabus. Mark the verbs you already know, take the quiz on the ones you are unsure about, and follow the linked grammar exercises to see the same verbs working in tenses and structures.
Frequently asked questions
How were these 100 verbs chosen?
They are the 100 highest-ranked verbs in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), a one-billion-word corpus of American English. We did not hand-pick them — we filtered the corpus frequency list down to entries tagged as verbs and took the top 100 in order.
Why are 'can', 'will' and 'would' in a list of verbs?
They are modal verbs, and the corpus tags them as verbs rather than as a separate class. Because they are extremely frequent, they rank high. We kept them in place instead of quietly removing them, so the ranking still matches the underlying data.
Do I need to learn all 100 to hold a conversation?
No, but they are the highest-value 100 verbs you could learn. The first twenty alone cover an enormous share of everyday speech, and the whole list is well within A1-B1 vocabulary for the most part.
What do the CEFR levels next to each verb mean?
They are our editorial estimate of the level at which a learner typically meets and uses that verb, expressed on the CEFR scale from A1 to C2. They are a study aid, not part of the corpus data — the ranking itself comes purely from frequency.
Is the list the same as the number of words I need to know?
Each entry is a lemma — a dictionary headword that stands for all its forms. 'Be' covers is, am, are, was, were and been, so learning one entry gives you several forms at once.
Practise these words
Other rankings
Frequency data from www.wordfrequency.info, derived from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). wordfrequency.info