Academic Words

The Academic Word List (AWL) was developed by Averil Coxhead at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. It contains 570 word families which frequently appear in academic texts, but which are not contained in the General Service List (GSL)¹.

The words in the AWL are not connected with any particular subject, meaning they are useful for all students¹.

The 570 word families of the AWL are divided into 10 lists (called sublists) according to how frequent they are.

Sublist 1 has the most frequent word families, sublist 2 the next most frequent word families, up to sublist 10, which has the least frequent¹.

Each sublist contains 60 word families, except for sublist 10, which only has 30¹.

Source: Conversation with Bing, 6/23/2023

(1) Academic Word List (AWL) - EAP Foundation. https://www.eapfoundation.com/vocab/academic/awllists/.

(2) The Academic Word List - Oxford Learner's Dictionaries. https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/wordlist/academic/academic/.

(3) ACADEMIC WORD LIST - James Cook University. https://www.jcu.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/1015348/Academic-Word-List.pdf.

(4) Academic Wordlist - Exam English. https://www.examenglish.com/vocabulary/academic_wordlist.html.

(5) The Academic Word List - Oxford Learner's Dictionaries. https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/about/academic.

What are you going to do with those dictionaries?