Skip to main content
App StoreGoogle Play

erklären

erklären is a German verb meaning to explain, to make clear. It is the 374th most common word in German, which puts it at CEFR level A1. It turns up in about 1 in 426 sentences of real German prose.

374

rank

of 5,000

A1

CEFR level

by frequency

1 in 426

sentences

contain it

68.2%

running total

of a book covered

Running total is cumulative: knowing erklären and every German word above it covers 68.2% of the running words in a real book.

Is erklären worth learning now?

Yes - erklären is inside the first thousand German words, and those thousand cover 76.55% of the prose in a real book and 84.27% 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 German text against the CEFR bands to see whether what you are reading is at your level.

German words of the same frequency

See all 5,000 most common German words, or look up any of the 20,029 German words Einlang ranks.

Where this comes from

The rank is measured, not copied: 151 million words of subtitle dialogue for how German is spoken, and 48 public-domain books for how it is written. Conjugations and plurals count towards the word they belong to, so erklären 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 French words and the most common Spanish words.

Meet erklären where it actually lives

Photograph any German page and Einlang turns it into vocabulary, grammar notes and drills for that exact page - so words like erklären arrive in a sentence you cared about instead of on a flashcard on their own.

Try Einlang free