# In the dictionary, French wins. When you speak, Latin wins.

In DEX, 48.1%–52.6% of words are French or made from French words; 13.7% are inherited from Latin. In film and TV dialogue, 78.8% of words are Latin.

## Try to write a Romanian sentence with no Latin word in it

The small words get you first: și, de, în, la, să, nu, eu, tu, a fi, a avea are all inherited from Latin. The dictionary has 3.8 times as many French words as words inherited from Latin.

## Why you hear such different numbers about French and Latin in Romanian

- All DEX ’98 entries (59,000): French 40.9%, made in Romanian 38.8%, inherited Latin 2.5%.
- Only words from other languages (36,105): French 66.9%, Latin 7.9% (inherited 4.1%).
- Words made in Romanian credited to their source: French 52.6%, inherited Latin 13.7%.
- Film dialogue (332 million words): inherited Latin 78.8%, French 9.2%.
- Wikipedia: inherited Latin 61.9%, French 23.0%.

Half the Latin in dialogue comes from 16 words (fi, avea, nu, să, de, eu, el, vrea); French needs 312. Where DEX and Wiktionary classify the same word (32,701), they agree 92.1% of the time.

## How the words were counted

Origin: the etymology note in DEX ’98, dexonline database of 3 September 2026 (GPL v2+). Speech: OpenSubtitles 2018 frequency list. Writing: Romanian Wikipedia. Older prose: Wikisource, 1825–1949.

Full page, with the look-up and your own sentence: https://mariuscomper.uk/straturi/en/