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Dutch vocabulary, organised by theme

Every word list on this site gives you the article (de or het), the plural and a usage note — the three things most vocabulary lists leave out and most learners regret not learning first time round.

Learn frequency-first

Word frequency in Dutch, as in every language, is brutally top-heavy: the 1,000 most common words cover roughly 80% of everyday speech, and the next 1,000 add only a few percentage points more. So the fastest route to understanding real Dutch is not memorising exotic nouns — it’s nailing the high-frequency core: pronouns, common verbs, connectors, and the everyday nouns in the themed lists below. Each list on this site starts with the words you’ll actually hear and reads roughly in frequency order.

Always learn the article with the noun

The single best vocabulary habit in Dutch: never learn huis, learn het huis. The de/het choice looks cosmetic but it controls adjective endings, relative pronouns (die vs dat) and demonstratives (deze/dit) — guess wrong and several other words in your sentence come out wrong too. Retro-fitting articles onto hundreds of nouns you learned bare is miserable; learning them together from day one costs nothing. The patterns that let you predict most articles are covered in de or het.

Use spaced repetition — but feed it sentences

Spaced-repetition software (Anki and its relatives) is the most efficient known way to keep vocabulary in long-term memory: it re-tests each word just before you’d forget it, so ten minutes a day maintains thousands of words. Two rules make it work for Dutch. First, put the article and plural on the card, not just the noun. Second, prefer whole short sentences over isolated words — Ik neem de trein teaches you trein, its article and a usable chunk of word order in one card. Words you can already deploy in a sentence stick far better than words you can merely translate.

Your head start: cognates

Dutch is English’s closest major relative, and the overlap is enormous. Hundreds of everyday words are identical or transparent at a glance: water (water), appel (apple), boek (book), huis (house), drinken (to drink), groen (green), winter (winter), open (open). Once you learn a few sound correspondences — Dutch -ij- often matches English “i”, d often matches “th” (dank/thank, drie/three) — you can decode thousands more on sight. A realistic estimate is that an English speaker starts Dutch already “knowing” a quarter of the basic vocabulary.

But watch the false friends

The same closeness produces traps: words that look English and mean something else. Three classics:

There are a few dozen of these worth knowing cold before they embarrass you — the full list is at false friends.

Word lists by theme

• Numbers0 to a billion, ordinals, and the reversed order in 21–99 (eenentwintig = one-and-twenty).
• Days, months & seasonsThe calendar words — all lowercase in Dutch — with the prepositions they take.
• ColoursThe basic colours, their adjective forms, and why orange is a national institution.
• FamilyRelatives from moeder to schoonmoeder, with the de/het articles and plurals.
• Food & drinkGroceries, meals and restaurant staples, from brood and kaas to borrel.
• AnimalsPets, farm and wild animals — nearly all de words — plus animal idioms Dutch loves.
• BodyParts of the body with articles and plurals, and the phrases you need at a doctor’s visit.
• ClothingGarments and shopping vocabulary, including aanpassen (to try on) and the size words.
• House & homeRooms, furniture and household objects — diminutive-heavy territory, so lots of het.
• Travel & transportTrains, bikes and directions — the OV vocabulary daily life in the Netherlands runs on.
• Work & professionsJob titles, office vocabulary and the words you need for a Dutch CV or workplace chat.
• WeatherRain in its many Dutch varieties, plus the small-talk formulas built on the forecast.
• Telling timeWhy half zes means 5:30, not 6:30 — the Dutch clock system explained and drilled.
• False friendsDutch words that look English but aren’t — eventueel, slim, brutaal and the rest.
• LoanwordsWhat Dutch gave English (cookie, boss, yacht) and the English flooding back into Dutch.