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Why are some words more frequent than others? Surprisingly, the obvious answers to this seemingly simple question, e.g., that frequent words reflect greater communicative needs, are either wrong or incomplete. We show that a word’s frequency is strongly associated with its position in a semantic association network. More centrally located words are more frequent. But is a word’s centrality in a network merely a reflection of inherent centrality of the word’s meaning? Through cross-linguistic comparisons, we found that differences in the frequency of translation-equivalents are predicted by differences in the word’s network structures in the different languages. Specifically, frequency was linked to how many connections a word had and to its capacity to bridge words that are typically not linked. This hints that a word’s frequency (and with it, its meaning) may change as a function of the word’s association with other words.