5000 Most Common English Words List May 2026

# Download the Brown Corpus if not already downloaded nltk.download('brown')

import nltk from nltk.corpus import brown from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize from collections import Counter

# Save the list to a file with open('top_5000_words.txt', 'w') as f: for word, freq in top_5000: f.write(f'{word}\t{freq}\n') Keep in mind that the resulting list might not be perfect, as it depends on the corpus used and the preprocessing steps.

Do you have any specific requirements or applications in mind for this list?

# Tokenize the text and remove stopwords stopwords = nltk.corpus.stopwords.words('english') tokens = [word.lower() for word in brown.words() if word.isalpha() and word.lower() not in stopwords]