On Word Lists Roxanne Miller Word lists have been around since ancient times. The first known dictionaries were cuneiform tablets with bilingual wordlists, dating from around 2300 BCE (MSN encarta, 2009). The first Chinese dictionary was discovered around 800 BCE (Karlgren, 1931). A 9th-century CE Irish dictionary contained the word origin and explanations of over 1,400 Irish words (Russell, 2006). In India around 1320, a dictionary was compiled that was made up of Hindustani and Persian words (Rashid, 2012). Arabic dictionaries were compiled between the 8th and 14th centuries CE. In medieval Europe, glossaries with equivalents for Latin words in vernacular or simpler Latin were in use by academics and clergy. The earliest dictionaries in the English language were glossaries of French, Spanish or Latin words along with their definitions in English. An early non-alphabetical list of 8000 English words was the Elementarie, created in 1582 (Mulcaster, 1582). The first true English dictionary was written in 1755 and the Oxford English Dictionary was not completed until 1928 (Lynch, 2005). The first American dictionary was written in 1806 by Webster. Since this time, wordlists have been used by students to both learn the language and to declare knowledge of the language. In Roxifyonline, there are a number of wordlists used to help you gain a better understanding of your vocabulary acquisition and usage. The chart below gives you an idea of how the words are divided in the English language. The 250 most frequent words of a language are those without which you cannot construct any sentence. The 750 most frequent words constitute those that are used every single day by every person who speaks the language. The 2000 most frequent words constitute those that should enable you to express everything you could possibly want to say, albeit often by awkward circumlocutions. The 5000 most frequent words constitute the active vocabulary of native speakers without higher education. The 10,000 most frequent words constitute the active vocabulary of native speakers with higher education. The 20,000 most frequent words constitute what you need to recognize passively in order to read, understand, and enjoy a work of literature such as a novel by a notable author. What are the GSL, NGSL, AWL, and UWL? The General Service List (GSL) is a list of roughly 2,284 words published by Michael West in 1953 (West, 1953). The words were selected to represent the most frequent words of English and were taken from a corpus of written English. The target audience was English language learners and ESL teachers. To maximize the utility of the list, some frequent words that overlapped broadly in meaning with words already on the list were removed. These words selected were said to be of the greatest "general service" to learners of English at that time. The list is important because a person who knows all the words on the list and their related forms would understand approximately 90–95 percent of colloquial speech and 80–85 percent of common written texts. The list consists only of headwords, which means that the word "be" is high on the list, but assumes that the person is fluent in all forms of the word, e.g. am, is, are, was, were, being, and been. Because it is outdated and has not been updated since its inception, the New General Service List (NGSL) was chosen for inclusion in Roxifyonline. The New General Service List (NGSL) is a list of approximately 2800 core vocabulary words published by Dr. Charles Browne, Dr. Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips in March 2013 (Browne, Culligan, & Phillips, 2013). The words in the NGSL represent the most important high frequency words of the English language for second language learners of English and is a modern update of Michael West's 1953 GSL. Although there are more than 600,000 word families in the English language, the 2800 words in the NGSL give more than 90% coverage for learners when trying to read most general texts in English. The main goals of the NGSL project were to (1) modernize and greatly increase the size of the corpus used, and to (2) create a list of words that provided a higher degree of coverage with fewer words than the original GSL. The 273 million word subsection of the more than two billion word Cambridge English Corpus[4] is about 100x larger than the 2.5 million word corpus developed in the 1930s for the original GSL, and the approximately 2800 words in the NGSL gives about 6% more coverage than the GSL (90% vs 84%) when both lists are grouped with all forms of the word. The NGSL is used extensively throughout Asia. The Academic Word List (AWL) was developed by Averil Coxhead at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (Coxhead, 2000). The list contains 570 semantic fields which were selected because they appear with great frequency in a broad range of academic texts. The list does not include words that are in the most frequent 2000 words of English (the General Service List). The AWL was primarily made so that it could be used by teachers as part of a programme preparing learners for tertiary level study or used by students working alone to learn the words most needed to study at colleges or universities. The 570 words are divided into 10 sublists. The sublists are ordered such that the words in the first sublist are the most frequent words and those in the last sublist are the least frequent. The University Word List (UWL) was first designed by Xue and Nation in 1984 (Xue & Nation, 1984) It is a list of 836 words that are not included in the 2000, words of the General Service List , but are contained in academic texts. According to Nation (1990) the words in this list account for 8% of the words in a typical academic text. Roxifyonline only uses 266 of the words from this list as the others are included in the AWL. References Browne, C., Culligan, B., & Phillips, J. (2013). The New General Service List. Retrieved from The New General Service List.: http://www.newgeneralservicelist.org. Coxhead, A. (2000). A New Academic Word List. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213-238. Karlgren, B. (1931). The Early History of the Chou Li and Tso Chuan Texts. Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 3, pp. 1-59. Lynch, J. (2005). How Johnson's Dictionary Became the First Dictionary . Johnson and the English Language conference. Birmingham. MSN encarta. (2009, 1 1). WebCite. Retrieved 6 15, 2017, from Dictionary: http://www.webcitation.org/5kwbLyr75?url=http://encarta.msn.com/encycloped ia_761573731/Dictionary.html Mulcaster, R. (1582). Elementarie. London: T. Vautroullier. Rashid, O. (2012, July 23). Chasing Khusro. The Hindu. Russell, P. (2006). Sanas Chormaic. In J. T. Koch (Ed.), Celtic Culture. An Encyclopedia (p. 1559). ABC-CLIO Ltd. West, M. (1953). A General Servie List of English Words. London: Longman, Green, and Co. Xue, G., & Nation, P. (1984). A University Word List. Language Learning and Communication, 3(2), 215-229. .