The 1,000 Most Common Swedish Words

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

More Swedish lists: Nouns Verbs Adjectives Adverbs About learning Swedish

The 1,000 Most Common Swedish Words: the list

Tips for learning Swedish words

• Learn small function words such as inte, ju and igen early — they are short and appear constantly, yet they are easy to read past without really absorbing them.
• Drill vilja, kunna and veta as a group, and keep their meanings clearly apart: 'to want', 'to be able' and 'to know'.
• Note that okej is borrowed from English, so it costs you almost nothing to learn — spend the time you save on trickier items instead.
• Practise se, ge and bli as a set: they are short verbs that recur in everyday phrases, and typing them repeatedly from an English prompt fixes the spelling faster than reading them passively.
• When you reach words like mycket, lite and aldrig, build your own short example sentence for each instead of memorising the translation alone; it forces you to notice where Swedish puts them in a sentence.
• Revisit hitta and prata regularly — verbs like these are easy to recognise in a list but surprisingly easy to lose when you have to produce them from memory.