The 1,000 Most Common Italian Words

Ranked by real-world frequency. Study all of them free with spaced repetition.

More Italian lists: Nouns Verbs Adjectives Adverbs About learning Italian

The 1,000 Most Common Italian Words: the list

Tips for learning Italian words

• Learn avere (to have) and essere (to be) as a pair early on: both are irregular and both act as auxiliaries in compound tenses, so time spent on them speeds up everything else.
• Group verbs by their infinitive ending as you meet them - parlare (to talk or to speak) is an -are verb, prendere (to take) is -ere, and capire (to understand) is -ire - since the ending tells you which conjugation pattern to expect.
• Note that capire (to understand) belongs to the -ire verbs that insert -isc- in several present-tense forms, so check new -ire verbs rather than assuming they all behave alike.
• Watch for words that differ by a single letter, such as cosa (thing) and casa (house); typing the answer yourself, rather than just recognising it, stops them blurring together.
• Treat adverbs like bene (well), mai (never), ancora (again) and davvero (really) as fixed forms - unlike adjectives, they don't change for gender or number, so there's no agreement to worry about.
• Pair question words such as dove (where) and quando (when) with a short example sentence of your own instead of learning them in isolation; it makes them far easier to recall in conversation.
• Don't skip plain-looking high-frequency verbs like dare (to give) or trovare (to find) - you'll use them constantly, so knowing them cold matters more than collecting rarer words.