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zwölf

zwölf is a German number meaning twelve. It is the 1,335th most common word in German, which puts it at CEFR level A2. It turns up in about 1 in 1,250 sentences of real German prose.

1,335

rank

of 5,000

A2

CEFR level

by frequency

1 in 1,250

sentences

contain it

78.9%

running total

of a book covered

Running total is cumulative: knowing zwölf and every German word above it covers 78.9% of the running words in a real book.

Is zwölf worth learning now?

zwölf sits at rank 1,335, past the first thousand words that cover 76.55% 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 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 zwölf 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 zwölf where it actually lives

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