Most Useful Italian Words (Translated in English)

In today’s post, we’re going to talk about the most useful words in the Italian language and their meanings in English.

We’ll also teach you words that are similar to English and others that are similar but mean something completely different.

Finally, we’ll teach you some beautiful Italian words in English.

Let’s get started!

Useful Italian words

The Italian language is made up of hundreds of thousands of words — while it is hard to determine a specific number, some experts have estimated it to be between 160,000 and 260,000!

A number like this is intimidating for Italian learners. How is it possible for someone to learn 260,000 words in a foreign language?

But don’t be afraid! Only roughly 7,000 of these terms are spoken by Italians during the course of their lives, and only about 1,000 are used on a daily basis.

In this post, I’ll show you the most important Italian words you should know if you want to improve your Italian learning.

Common Italian words

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Let’s start with the most common Italian words.

Here’s a list of the most useful Italian words:

cosa

thing

anno

year

uomo

man

donna

woman

giorno

day

casa

home

tempo

time

pease

country, town

parola

word

padre

father

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madre

mother

acqua

water

Italian Words Similar to English

Here’s a list of Italian words similar to English:

False Friends in English and Italian

False friends are words in two different languages that sound or look very similar or even the same but have completely different meanings.

It’s important for you to start getting used to these words; otherwise, you might be involved in an awkward situation.

• argomento vs argument:

• eventualmente vs eventually:

• fattoria vs factory:

• libreria vs library:

• parenti vs. parents:

• preservativo vs preservative:

• pretendere vs to pretend:

• camera vs. camera:

Beautiful Italian Words

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Here’s a list of what we consider the most beautiful Italian words:

Final thoughts

It goes without saying that the most important Italian words you should learn are determined by your interests and the reasons that motivate you to learn the language, for which a customized script is a good idea.

But it’s also essential to have a strong base of Italian words that you know.

Use this post as a starting point for your personalized list, and feel free to incorporate as many of the listed Italian terms as you wish!

For more Italian words, check out also: Useful Italian expressions, common Italian words and beautiful Italian words.

Still translating in your head? Wanna speak Italian for real? Check out Stefano's courses to think directly in Italian and become fluent fast!