Word Frequency Lists

These lists can be found listed in the Net Dictionary Index.

	The 2000 Most Frequent Words (Brown Corpus)
	The next 3000 Most Frequent Words (Brown Corpus)
	The first 1000 Most Frequent Word Families in Academic English (MFWL K1)
	The second 1000 Most Frequent Word Families in Academic English (MFWL 2K)
	The Academic Word List

1. The MFWL 1-2k and MFWL 2-5K created from the Brown Corpus

These are the Most Frequent Word Lists built from the Brown Corpus with Concapp for Windows. The lists are based solely on word counts using the Uniique Words Profiler which lists the instances for each word (the Brown Corpus comprises 1,015,945 words with 47,218 unique words). The start of the first list is as follows:

	Word	Instances	% Frequency
1.	The	4434	6.8872
2.	of	36410	3.5839
3.	and	28854	2.8401
4.	to	26154	2.5744
5.	a	23363	2.2996
6.	in	21345	2.1010
7.	that	10594	1.0428
8.	is	10102	0.9943

The first list contains the first 2000 most frequent words (1-2000) and the second list contains the next three thousand most frequent words (2001-5000). These lists reflect general non-academic English as it is used in newspapers, magazines and books.

2. The Most Frequent Word Families in Academic English (MFWL K1 - MFWL K2)

These lists contain the 1 - 1000 (K1) word families and the second Most Frequent 1001 - 2000 (K2) word family lists found in Academic English, and were developed by Paul Nation of the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. They are more sophisticated than the lists created with the Brown corpus, as they contain not only the actual high frequency words themselves but also derivative words which may in fact not be used so frequently. For instance, the word ACCEPT is listed in the K1 first 1000 most frequent word families, and the derived words are listed as follows:

acceptability
acceptable
unacceptable
acceptance
accepted
accepting
accepts

The derived words unacceptable and acceptability are also included, and the total number of words in the list is actually 4105 words. Similarly, list K2 contains 3711 words.

3. The Academic Word List

The Academic Word List contains 570 word families, comprising 3,110 words, which were selected according to their frequency of use in academic texts. The list does not include words that are in the most frequent 2000 words of English, which are listed separately in the K1 and K2 lists described above. 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 tertiary institutions.

The lists containing the 2000 Most Frequent Word Families and the Academic Word List as compiled by Paul Nation reflect academic English as it is used in universities.