The 1000 most useful French words
In order, each with its English meaning, part of speech, level and an example sentence in which it really occurs. How many you want to see is set below — from 50 to 2000. Practice happens on the list pages.
What “most useful” means here
The order is calculated, not asserted. What is counted is how often a word occurs in the target-language sentences on this site — in every example sentence, every grammar rule, every reading text. That shows, for each word, how much of this material it unlocks. The same calculation is set out in full on Where do you start?, together with the curve where it flattens out.
It says nothing about French as a whole and everything about the path someone takes here. A word that does not appear in a single sentence on this site is therefore not included: it may be a good word, but here it unlocks nothing.
What this list is not: not a frequency list from a corpus, not taken from a textbook and not an official word list for an exam. If you want to go beyond the 2000: all the word lists are right there.
1000 words.