---
id: stop-words
version: "2025.11.4"
license: BSD-3-Clause
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: aging
---

# stop-words — Get list of common stop words in various languages in Python

License: permissive · Maintenance: aging · Downloads: 207.3K/mo

## What it is and what it does

Stop-words is a lightweight Python library that bundles curated lists of common words (like "the", "is", "at") across multiple languages. It is designed for natural language processing and text analysis workflows where filtering out these high-frequency, low-semantic-value words improves downstream analysis—keyword extraction, topic modeling, search relevance, and similar tasks.

The package offers both simple and safe loading modes, built-in caching for repeated access, and a filter system for custom post-processing of word lists. It has no external runtime dependencies, making it easy to add to any Python project. The library supports both ISO 639-1 language codes (e.g., 'en') and full language names (e.g., 'english') for convenience.

Use it for:

- Filter stop words from user-generated text before extracting keywords or computing term frequency in search or analytics systems.
- Preprocess multilingual documents for topic modeling or text classification by removing common words in each language.
- Build a text summarization pipeline that excludes stop words to focus on semantically meaningful terms.
- Clean and normalize text input for information retrieval or semantic similarity matching tasks.
- Support language-specific text analysis in chatbots or NLP pipelines that handle multiple languages.

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Provides curated stop-word lists for multiple languages, enabling filtering of common words in natural language processing and text analysis tasks.

Yes. Stop-words is a mature, zero-dependency library with permissive licensing, low install friction, and no known vulnerabilities. It is actively maintained and widely used. Install it if you need multilingual stop-word filtering for NLP or text preprocessing; the aging maintenance status is not a blocker for a stable, feature-complete utility.

## Install

pip install stop-words
uv add stop-words
poetry add stop-words

## Installing stop-words

Before you install: Low friction: pure Python wheel with zero runtime dependencies. Maintenance status is aging—last release 284 days old—but the repository remains active and the package is mature (Development Status :: 6 - Mature).

License in practice: BSD-3-Clause (permissive): you may use, modify, and distribute this package freely in commercial and private projects, provided you include the license notice.

Quickstart:

pip install stop-words

from stop_words import get_stop_words

stop_words = get_stop_words('en')
text = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
filtered = [w for w in text.lower().split() if w not in stop_words]
print(filtered)  # ['quick', 'brown', 'fox', 'jumps', 'lazy', 'dog']

Requires Python 3.11 or later.

Verify before relying:

- Whether all 34+ languages are equally well-maintained or if some lists are outdated.
- Performance characteristics when filtering large texts or with many concurrent language loads.
- Current download volume and user base size.

## Package facts

- License: BSD-3-Clause (permissive)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: aging
- Downloads: 207.3K/month (top 15,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

stop words filtering, nlp text preprocessing, multilingual stop words, common word removal, text cleaning library, language-specific stop lists, keyword extraction preprocessing, nlp, text-preprocessing, multilingual

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