fehlen
Meaning in English: to be missing, to be absent
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Test my vocabularyExample
Heute fehlen drei Schüler wegen Grippe.
Three pupils are absent today with flu.
Forms of fehlen in the top 5,000
German verbs change their ending with the person and tense, and each form is counted on its own. These forms of fehlen are also in the top 5,000:
An meiner Jacke fehlt ein Knopf.
There's a button missing from my jacket.
Beim Zählen fehlte ein Stuhl.
When we counted, one chair was missing.
How common is fehlen?
fehlen is number 1,413 of the 5,000 most common German words. In the texts the list is counted from it appears 65 times per million words — about once every 15,000 words. Its most frequent form is fehlt (#1,407).
Know every word down to this one and you recognise about 68% of the words in an ordinary German text. A2 means an elementary word, usually learned in the first year.
Next to it in the frequency list
- 1,409Beamtencivil servants, officers
- 1,410berücksichtigttaken into account
- 1,411das Zeichensign, signal, character
- 1,412die Dauerduration, length
- 1,413fehlento be missing, to be absent
- 1,414vermitteltarranged, conveyed
- 1,415modernemodern
- 1,416übernommentaken over, adopted
- 1,417der Klimaschutzclimate protection
In these word lists
Translations, levels and examples were written with AI help and are awaiting review by a native speaker — how the list was made.