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Japanese word frequency list

40,727 words · CC BY 4.0 · 2026

The 40,727 most frequent Japanese words in their dictionary forms, counted by Shiberu from Wikipedia, public-domain literature on Aozora Bunko and Tatoeba example sentences. It is the list behind the frequency ranks in the Shiberu Reader and browser extension, and it is free for anyone to use, commercially too.

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README

Licence text

UTF-8, tab-separated, with a header row and three columns: rank (1 is the most frequent), lemma (the dictionary form) and per_million (occurrences per million words).

Stable links that always point at the newest version: ja-frequency-latest.tsv and ja-frequency-latest.tsv.gz.

Look up a word

Word

Type the dictionary form of the word.

The 50 most frequent words

Rank

Word

Per million

1

の

58,157

2

た

37,819

3

に

37,082

4

は

36,201

5

だ

34,237

6

を

33,628

7

て

32,038

8

が

27,729

9

する

23,666

10

と

23,602

11

で

13,900

12

ない

11,875

13

いる

11,372

14

ある

10,054

15

も

8,993

16

か

8,298

17

ます

8,217

18

こと

5,914

19

その

5,537

20

なる

5,164

21

から

5,142

22

です

4,621

23

れる

4,080

24

お

4,060

25

ぬ

3,553

26

この

3,209

27

いう

2,780

28

人

2,636

29

ば

2,572

30

よう

2,507

31

私

2,458

32

それ

2,360

33

思う

2,125

34

もの

2,062

35

や

2,049

36

よ

1,908

37

何

1,844

38

見る

1,830

39

ん

1,731

40

行く

1,661

41

家

1,640

42

彼

1,625

43

られる

1,624

44

これ

1,620

45

どう

1,563

46

まで

1,514

47

時

1,504

48

できる

1,499

49

日

1,484

50

中

1,462

How it was made

Counted from these sources, with these shares of the blend:

Japanese Wikipedia

33.3%

Encyclopedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Aozora Bunko

33.3%

Literature · Public domain works only

Tatoeba

33.3%

Example sentences · CC BY 2.0 FR

Every text went through Shiberu's Japanese analyzer (fugashi with UniDic, the same tagger and dictionary-form rule the Reader uses), so each entry is a word as a learner looks it up: 言っ → 言う, 分かっ → 分かる.

Each source gives a rate per million words for every word, and a word's score is the median of its three rates. One source cannot push its own oddities up (names in example sentences, years in Wikipedia, archaic words in old novels): a second source has to agree. A word must appear in at least two sources.

Particles and auxiliaries stay in the list, because a reader meets them in every sentence. Left out: person names, numerals, symbols, words written only in Latin letters and over-long fragments.

Only counts are published: the files contain no text from any source.

Licence and credit

Free to copy, share and adapt for any purpose, commercial use included, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. The one condition is credit: please name Shiberu with this line.

Shiberu Japanese Word Frequency List 2026 by Shiberu (https://shiberu.app/japanese-frequency-list), licensed under CC BY 4.0.

When you share the files themselves, keep the README with them: it credits the sources as their licences ask. The list holds statistics about the texts (which words occur and how often), not the texts.

Learning Korean too? See the Korean frequency list.

Questions or corrections: [email protected].