Academic Vocabulary Lists



Note that these lists are strictly for academic use. For a commercial license, please contact us. Also, please do not place these lists on another website -- even for student use. Just link to our site so that other people can download the files for themselves. Thanks.

The following are the three wordlists that can be downloaded:

Download

Sample

Explanation

Word families
Word  Excel

Sample

This is the format that is closest to that of Coxhead's Academic Word List (AWL). Our families, however, contain a great deal of information that is not available in the older AWL. Available in two formats: Word (probably better for printing), or Excel (probably better for viewing, and with raw data).

Academic "core"

Sample

The top 3,000 lemmas, listed individually (i.e. not in word families). It also shows the frequency of each word (lemma) in each of the nine domains of COCA-Academic (e.g. Business, Law, or Medicine).

All COCA-Academic

Sample

The 20,000 or so most frequent words (lemmas) in the 120 million words of COCA Academic. This list includes all words that are:
1. Part of the "academic core" (e.g. research, development, or indicate)
2. Technical/domain-specific: limited primarily to one or two domains (e.g. assessment in Education, cell in Science, or federal in Law/PolSci)
3. All other words in COCA-Academic, including "general" (non-academic) words like with, know, or people