halt
halt is a German particle meaning just, simply (stating what cannot be helped). It is the 379th most common word in German, which puts it at CEFR level A1. It turns up in about 1 in 503 sentences of real German prose.
379
rank
of 5,000
A1
CEFR level
by frequency
1 in 503
sentences
contain it
68.3%
running total
of a book covered
Running total is cumulative: knowing halt and every German word above it covers 68.3% of the running words in a real book.
Is halt worth learning now?
Yes - halt 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
- retten #375 - to save, to rescue
- selber #376 - self
- bereit #377 - ready
- schwarz #378 - black, reflecting little or no light
- jungen #380 - to give birth
- früh #381 - early
- falsch #382 - false, unfactual, untrue
- ziemlich #383 - pretty, quite, rather, fairly, kind of
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 halt 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.
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