pas
pas is an French adverb meaning The most common adverb of negation in French, typically translating into English as not, don't, doesn't, etc.. It is the 10th most common word in French, which puts it at CEFR level A1. It turns up in about 1 in 13 sentences of real French prose.
10
rank
of 5,000
A1
CEFR level
by frequency
1 in 13
sentences
contain it
26.4%
running total
of a book covered
Running total is cumulative: knowing pas and every French word above it covers 26.4% of the running words in a real book.
Is pas worth learning now?
Yes - pas 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
- je #6 - I
- et #7 - and
- il #8 - he
- que #9 - that
- ce #11 - this, that
- vous #12 - the plural personal pronoun in the second person
- en #13 - in
- ne #14 - not
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 pas 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 pas where it actually lives
Photograph any French page and Einlang turns it into vocabulary, grammar notes and drills for that exact page - so words like pas arrive in a sentence you cared about instead of on a flashcard on their own.
Try Einlang free