Most Common French Verbs: How Far 10 Get You

Ten verbs - être, avoir, aller, faire, dire, pouvoir, vouloir, savoir, voir, devoir - make up 54.1% of every verb in French film dialogue, and all ten are irregular. The top 100 reach 80.0%, which is why a short list gets you surprisingly far and why that list cannot be the regular verbs.

We measured it four ways with a single definition of “verb”. Two sources are the frequency columns of Lexique 3.83: one built from film subtitles, a proxy for speech, and one from books. The other two are texts we tagged ourselves: eleven public-domain classics from Project Gutenberg (902,000 words) and 75 current news articles (49,000 words).

What are the most common French verbs?

Ranked by film dialogue, with the written rank beside it:

The top of the list is remarkably stable. Nine of the ten most frequent verbs are the same in speech and in books; only devoir (speech) and venir (books) swap places. By rank 20 you have every verb needed for Je dois y aller, Tu peux venir ?, Il faut que je te dise and Je ne sais pas.

How much do the top 10, 25, 50 and 100 verbs cover?

Coverage here means the share of all verb occurrences produced by the N most frequent verbs of each source.

Speech is far more concentrated than writing. Ten verbs do more work in film dialogue than twenty-five do in books. Verbs are also a larger slice of speech overall: 24.8% of the words Lexique counts in film dialogue are verbs, against 18.6% in books, so the top ten alone account for more than one spoken word in eight.

Writing spreads out. The books reach only 63.9% with a hundred verbs because narrative leans on a long tail - sembler, répondre, paraître, s’écrier - that conversation rarely needs. The same pattern holds for vocabulary as a whole, as measured in how many French words you need.

How much of the load do être, avoir, faire and aller carry?

Four verbs carry 41.4% of every verb in film dialogue and 29.2% in books.

Part of that weight comes from grammar rather than meaning. Avoir and être build every compound tense: in speech, 57.8% of avoir occurrences are auxiliary uses (j’ai mangé) and 19.2% of être occurrences are (je suis parti). Which auxiliary goes with which verb is its own measured problem, set out in avoir vs être in the passé composé.

Strip the auxiliaries out and the concentration barely moves. The top ten still cover 47.9% of spoken verbs, and the big four still carry a third. Among the big four, aller is the one that gains most in speech - 4.4% against 1.7% in books - largely because conversation uses it for the near future: je vais le faire, I’m going to do it.

Why are the top verbs almost all irregular?

The usual explanation is that frequency protects irregularity: forms people use constantly resist the smoothing that regularises rare verbs over the centuries, so the most useful verbs end up being the least predictable ones.

The Académie française defines the first group as every -er infinitive “sauf aller et envoyer”, and places aller in the third group “avec tous les verbes irréguliers”. Using that definition:

That is the central paradox of French verbs. By dictionary count, nearly nine verbs in ten are regular -er verbs. By use, more than two verbs in three are irregular. The third group is also broader than “irregular” suggests: it includes -re verbs such as attendre and rendre, which follow a pattern of their own.

The second group is the surprise. Courses traditionally present finir, nous finissons as the second regular pattern, yet in film dialogue it accounts for 1.2% of verb occurrences and finir is its only member in the top 100, at rank 43.

Do spoken and written French use different verbs?

Mostly the same verbs, in slightly different orders. The spoken and written top 25 share 22 members, and the top 100 share 77.

What differs is the edge. Speech promotes appeler, arriver and attendre into the top 25 - je t’appelle, j’arrive, attends ! - while books promote demander, mettre and rester, the verbs of narration. News has its own signature: utiliser is 14th in our news sample but 125th in film dialogue and 499th in books, and annoncer is 18th against 317th in film dialogue.

Which French verbs should you learn first?

Order by payoff, not by pattern. A sequence that follows the data:

1. être, avoir - the two auxiliaries and a third of the load on their own.
2. aller, faire - movement, the near future, and the most versatile verb in the language.
3. pouvoir, vouloir, devoir, savoir - the modals, each followed by an infinitive, which multiplies what you can say with every verb you add later.
4. dire, voir, venir, prendre - the irregular remainder of the top 13.
5. Regular -er verbs as a pattern, since they are 55 of the top 100 and every new one you meet follows it.

Only then the -ir pattern of finir, when you meet it. Our A1 curriculum follows the same logic: être and avoir in the first level, aller and faire by the fifth, the modals in the sixth, and regular -ir verbs only in the seventh.

A single example shows why the modals come so early: Je peux venir ? Tu dois partir ? On va voir. Three verbs, three infinitives, and the second verb in each case does not need to be conjugated at all.

Where does Gallus fit?

A list tells you which verbs matter; it does not make them automatic. That happens through meeting pouvoir, falloir or devoir hundreds of times in context. Gallus is built around graded stories that recycle exactly these high-frequency verbs level by level, so the irregular forms become familiar long before you are asked to produce them.

What is the bottom line?

Ten verbs are more than half of the verbs you hear, and every one of them is irregular. The top 100 reach 80.0% in speech and about 64-70% in writing. Learn être, avoir, aller, faire and the modals first, treat the regular -er pattern as a tool for the long tail, and let finir wait.

Where these verbs sit in the wider grammar sequence is set out in French grammar by CEFR level.