A lemma-based, coverage-graded frequency list for modern Ukrainian, built as open data. It answers a practical question with a real number: how much of what you read does a given amount of vocabulary actually unlock?
The report that started this series was blunt about the gap: for Ukrainian, the frequency lists a serious learner needs are thin, often wordform-based, and sometimes quietly calqued from Russian. A wordform list scatters a single word's frequency across a dozen or more inflected forms, so it understates how much a given amount of vocabulary buys you.
This list counts lemmas instead, the dictionary form a learner actually studies, with its part of speech. It is derived from a large, modern, native-authored corpus, so it reflects the Ukrainian people actually write today, not a mid-century textbook.
For comparison, in English the ~2800 words of the General Service List average about 82% coverage. Ukrainian needs far more lemmas to reach the same place. That is the inflection tax, measured.
The most frequent lemmas, with part of speech and per-mille frequency. The full 12,000 are in the download.
| # | Lemma | POS | per mille |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | в | ADP | 20.7489 |
| 2 | на | ADP | 20.6735 |
| 3 | у | ADP | 18.6486 |
| 4 | і | CCONJ | 16.5815 |
| 5 | з | ADP | 15.259 |
| 6 | бути | VERB | 10.6332 |
| 7 | не | PART | 10.4292 |
| 8 | що | SCONJ | 10.3296 |
| 9 | до | ADP | 9.1939 |
| 10 | за | ADP | 8.5376 |
| 11 | та | CCONJ | 8.4347 |
| 12 | який | DET | 7.9025 |
| 13 | рік | NOUN | 6.6948 |
| 14 | про | ADP | 6.2134 |
| 15 | він | PRON | 6.1849 |
| 16 | Україна | PROPN | 5.8085 |
| 17 | це | PRON | 5.7827 |
| 18 | а | CCONJ | 4.994 |
| 19 | цей | DET | 4.3466 |
| 20 | як | SCONJ | 4.203 |
| 21 | для | ADP | 4.1004 |
| 22 | від | ADP | 3.9154 |
| 23 | я | PRON | 3.642 |
| 24 | вони | PRON | 3.403 |
Part-of-speech make-up of the released list. Proper nouns are included and labeled, so you can filter them out.
Thread one is released. The rest are registered honestly as planned, each naming the open source it will build on. No thread claims a result it does not yet have.
The top 12000 lemmas of modern Ukrainian, ranked by corpus frequency, each with its part of speech, per-mille frequency, cumulative running-text coverage, and a thousand-rank frequency band. Published as CSV and JSON, plus an Anki-importable deck seed.
Study the words that actually pay off first, in the right order, as lemmas rather than scattered wordforms. See exactly how much reading coverage a given amount of vocabulary buys.
Map the frequency list onto validated CEFR levels (A1 to C2) by cross-referencing the emerging corpus-based Ukrainian vocabulary profile, so the bands mean a proficiency level and not just a frequency rank.
Know which words belong to which level, so a course or a deck can be built to a target.
Flag Russianisms and Surzhyk forms on the list and pair them with the idiomatic native alternative, using the open Ukrainian morphological and style tooling (VESUM and LanguageTool Pravopysnyk).
Learn the idiomatic word, not the calqued one that older materials quietly teach.
Attach a pronunciation and the full inflection paradigm to each lemma, from the open Wiktionary declension and conjugation tables and open pronunciation audio, so the Anki deck teaches a lemma plus its forms rather than a bare headword.
Hear the word and see how it changes across the seven cases and the aspect pairs, the part that inflection makes hard.
A self-scoring yes or no vocabulary-size test drawn from this list: 60 real lemmas and 60 constructed pseudowords, stratified across the 12 frequency bands, scored with the standard false-alarm correction and mapped onto the coverage curve. No Ukrainian equivalent exists off the shelf.
Measure your vocabulary against a real proficiency proxy instead of guessing, and see roughly how much running text that vocabulary actually unlocks.
Everything on this page re-derives from these files. They are versioned and hashed. The list is CC-BY: use it, fork it, build on it.
The lemmas.anki.tsv file imports straight into Anki as a frequency deck seed.
Lawrence, J. (2026). Ukrainian Frequency: a lemma-based, coverage-graded open frequency list (v0.1.0). jakelawrence.xyz/research/ukrainian-frequency. Derived from UberText 2.0 (Chaplynskyi, 2023).
These checks re-run in your browser against the shipped numbers. If any fails, the release is inconsistent and the page says so.
The frequency signal is the UberText 2.0 lemma frequency dictionary (lang-uk). This release re-publishes derived aggregate counts, which are facts, not the source corpus text. Rows are filtered to Ukrainian-Cyrillic-alphabetic lemmas carrying a linguistic Universal Dependencies part of speech; punctuation, symbols, digit tokens, foreign or unclassified tokens, and single-character proper nouns are dropped.
Coverage is recomputed here from raw occurrence counts, not read from the source file's own frequency columns, whose normalization is undocumented. Frequency bands are transparent thousand-rank bins and are NOT CEFR levels; validated CEFR alignment is the next planned thread. The corpus is news and reference heavy, so war-era and civic vocabulary rank prominently. That is disclosed, not smoothed away.
Part of a standing effort to close the digital-tooling gap for the Ukrainian language.
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