Common Italian words

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The five hundred most commonly used words in spoken Italian divided into groups of 25, in order of frequency. The highest frequency words are first.

The audio was recorded by a native Italian speaker with no regional accent.

Common Italian words: Order of frequency

The list and word order of the 500 most frequently spoken Italian words is approximate. See common word lists for the reasons. The following rules have been loosely followed in composing this list from the original :-

Nouns. Plurals have been removed. So for example, uomo (man) is included but uomini (men) is not. However, the number of instances of 'uomo' and 'uomini' would not have been added together.

Adjectives. The masculine singular only has been included in the list. For example, questo (this) has the following additional forms (questa, questi and queste) some of which appear in the original.

Verbs are sometimes given as infinitive and sometimes as first person singular where it seemed most useful and appropriate.

In Italian, when the word for 'the' comes after specific prepositions, the two are combined to make a single word.E.g. 'da' followed by 'la' become 'dalla', or 'in' followed by 'lo' becomes 'nella'. The definite article after these prepositions becoming (al, allo, dal, dallo, nello, sullo ... ) has not been included in this particular top 500.

The original list treats groups of characters as distinct words so as an illustration 'hai' and 'hai visto' would not be considered as 'hai' and 'hai visto' but 'hai', 'hai' and 'visto'. This is not how language works and this will have an effect on the word order. Nevertheless, the order and composition of this list will be useful to any Italian learner.

Many of the verbs (as the initial corpus was from films) are likely to have been used as commands, but have been translated as second person singular. E.g. lasci which could either mean leave! or 'you leave' has been translated as 'you leave'.

These are the most commonly used words in spoken Italian. The most frequently used in written Italian would differ.

The next step. Fluency

You can find a lot of excellent Italian content available for free, such as these five hundred conversational Italian Sentences covering essential vocabulary, or the frequently used words in spoken Italian on Surface languages.

If you are prefer a more structured approach there are extremely good paid resources such as ItalianPod101.com, and others as outlined in this guide to learning Italian.