Complete list of LEGO elements, sortable from most common to least

[henrysunset]

Does anyone have a list of LEGO elements which can be sorted from most common to least common. I do acknowledge that "common" is difficult to calculate as we do not know how many copies the LEGO group creates of each set, but we do know what parts are in each set, and how many of each part. Reasonable proxies for "commonness" could include sum of the # of parts in each set, # of new elements available on Bricklink, or similar. I do not care about different colors of the same part for this exercise.

My collection of LEGO Brick Labels at http://brickarchitect.com/labels/ already includes over 700 elements, but I want to make sure that I've included all 500 of the most common elements, and after that I want to keep improving the collection further.

Sincerely,

---tom

P.S. Even if you don't have this in a human readable format, let me know if you are aware of scripts or an excel file with the source data.

[Paul B Technic]

Sounds like a great idea.

[antp]

  On 5/1/2016 at 12:06 AM, henrysunset said:

P.S. Even if you don't have this in a human readable format, let me know if you are aware of scripts or an excel file with the source data.

Bricklink's catalog can be downloaded, so I suppose you could generate such statistics from these data.

[62Bricks]

You could piece something together using the "Most Common Parts" stats pages at Bricklink: http://www.bricklink.com/catalogStats.asp?statID=C&itemType=P

Unfortunately, it only shows you the top 25, ranked by how many set inventories the parts appear in. BUT you can manipulate the list by choosing various categories. For example, using the dropdown menu at the top, you can choose "Brick" and get the list of the 25 most common bricks. Same with Plates, Slopes, etc. If you did that for 20 or 25 of the largest part categories, you'd have a pretty accurate list.

Of course since this information is obviously kept in the BL database somewhere it might be possible to get at it more directly.

[henrysunset]

  On 5/1/2016 at 9:08 AM, antp said:

Bricklink's catalog can be downloaded...

Does anyone have information on how to download the database? I am sure it can be done by scraping the website, but hopefully there is a more official way.

---tom

[zux]

  On 5/1/2016 at 3:17 PM, henrysunset said:

Does anyone have information on how to download the database? I am sure it can be done by scraping the website, but hopefully there is a more official way.

Download BL Catalog

[henrysunset]

It was fun to rediscover this thread many years later - I have since created an interactive LEGO Parts Guide which includes an up-to-date list of the most common current parts, as well as the ability to see the most common parts of all-time...

Links:

• CURRENT - Explore parts used in LEGO sets released in the past 5 years.
• ALL YEARS - Explore parts used in LEGO sets released in the past 70+ years.

 

I'd love to know if people find this interesting and/or useful!

---Tom

[Mylenium]

It's a bit of fun trivia, but there's probably limited practical use for it. After all, I can already see all those gazillions of 1 x 1 and 1 x 2 elements when I'm digging through them when I'm disassembling models. ;-)

Mylenium

[MAB]

I was having a look around. Under the SNOT section, you have the bag tag cube as a SNOT piece, but don't list the die cube (BL = 64776pb01). The latter is just as good.

[Kalais]

  On 8/17/2025 at 10:34 PM, henrysunset said:

It was fun to rediscover this thread many years later - I have since created an interactive LEGO Parts Guide which includes an up-to-date list of the most common current parts, as well as the ability to see the most common parts of all-time...

Links:

• CURRENT - Explore parts used in LEGO sets released in the past 5 years.
• ALL YEARS - Explore parts used in LEGO sets released in the past 70+ years.

 

I'd love to know if people find this interesting and/or useful!

---Tom

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Hah, I always link your site when someone asks me for a brick labels. Great job :) I am not using them myself since I just memorized all my drawers and I like them clean but my son got it and tons of people I recommended it to.