01
Frequency, not chapters
The first 1,000 words cover 73.1% of film dialogue and 59.6% of written English. You meet them first, in the order they actually occur.
English vocabulary, by frequency
The 5,000 English words that matter most
Ranked from three corpora — film dialogue, journalism and encyclopedic prose — so the order reflects the whole language rather than one genre. Every word carries its pronunciation.
02
Three corpora, not one
A single corpus is a genre. Subtitles alone teach you to follow a film and leave you lost in a newspaper; the blend fixes that.
03
Pronunciation on every word
English spelling does not predict sound, so every transcription comes from CMUdict rather than from a rule — 4,999 of the 5,000.
Words 1–10 of 5,000
001
the
/ðə/
002
to
/ˈtu/
003
and
/ənd/
004
of
/ˈʌv/
005
a
/ə/
006
in
/ɪn/
007
that
/ˈðæt/
008
is
/ˈɪz/
009
it
/ˈɪt/
010
for
/ˈfɔɹ/