défense
défense is a French noun meaning defence (action of defending or protecting from attack, danger or injury, or any means for that purpose). It is the 1,238th most common word in French, which puts it at CEFR level A2. It turns up in about 1 in 2,500 sentences of real French prose.
1,238
rank
of 5,000
A2
CEFR level
by frequency
1 in 2,500
sentences
contain it
78.1%
running total
of a book covered
Running total is cumulative: knowing défense and every French word above it covers 78.1% of the running words in a real book.
Is défense worth learning now?
défense sits at rank 1,238, past the first thousand words that cover 75.99% of a book on their own. It is a A2 word: worth learning once the commonest thousand are secure, and you will meet it often enough at that point to make it stick.
Frequency is the honest guide to order, not to method. A word learned from a list on its own fades; the same word met inside a sentence you wanted to read stays. Check a French text against the CEFR bands to see whether what you are reading is at your level.
French words of the same frequency
- jean #1,234 - a pair of jeans
- renvoyer #1,235 - to resend, retransmit
- mensonge #1,236 - lie, falsehood
- lâche #1,237 - loose, slack
- rare #1,239 - rare
- sergent #1,240 - sergeant
- source #1,241 - source, spring
- ayez #1,242 - second-person plural present subjunctive/imperative of avoir
See all 5,000 most common French words, or look up any of the 20,063 French words Einlang ranks.
Where this comes from
The rank is measured, not copied: 281 million words of subtitle dialogue for how French is spoken, and 76 public-domain books for how it is written. Conjugations and plurals count towards the word they belong to, so défense is ranked as a word rather than as a spelling. The meaning and part of speech come from Wiktionary. Generated 2026-07-27.
Also on Einlang: the most common Spanish words and the most common German words.
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