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est-il

est-il is a French phrase meaning is he. It is the 387th most common word in French, which puts it at CEFR level A1. It turns up in about 1 in 704 sentences of real French prose.

387

rank

of 5,000

A1

CEFR level

by frequency

1 in 704

sentences

contain it

67.2%

running total

of a book covered

Running total is cumulative: knowing est-il and every French word above it covers 67.2% of the running words in a real book.

Is est-il worth learning now?

Yes - est-il is inside the first thousand French words, and those thousand cover 75.99% of the prose in a real book and 81.81% of everyday speech. Words this common are worth far more study time than anything further down the list.

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

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 est-il 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.

Meet est-il where it actually lives

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