What Are the NGSL and NAWL? Free Word Lists for English Learners

The NGSL, or New General Service List, is a list of high-frequency English words published in 2013 by Charles Browne, Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips (official site). The same year saw the NAWL, the New Academic Word List, for academic English. Both are free, and anyone can download them.

Word books rarely tell you how their words were chosen. The NGSL and NAWL are lists whose method and numbers are public. In this post I check, on the official site, what the two lists were built from, how many words they have and how much English text they cover. In the second half I describe how to use the lists in ABC George, the app I make.

What the NGSL is

The name comes from the General Service List, or GSL, published by Michael West in 1953. The GSL served for decades as the standard list of basic words in English teaching. The NGSL was made as its modern replacement.

According to the NGSL FAQ, the NGSL was built from a 273 million word sample of the Cambridge English Corpus. Both English itself and the amount of text available have changed since the GSL was made, and the NGSL chose the words again from a modern corpus.

The figures on the NGSL page:

• The latest version is 1.2, released in April 2023.
• It has 2,809 words, eight more than the previous version, 1.01.
• It covers 92% or more of general English text on average.

As examples of coverage, the page gives 93% for Harry Potter, 94% for TOEIC exams and 95% for many TV shows. It also cites research finding more than 95% coverage of Japan’s university entrance Center Exam.

The way words are counted matters too. The FAQ explains that the NGSL does not use word families, which would count derived words such as happy and happiness as one. It cites research questioning whether learners understand derived forms without learning each one.

What the NAWL is

The NAWL lists words that appear often in academic English, the kind of English in university textbooks and research papers. It leaves out the words already in the NGSL and is meant to be used on top of it.

According to the NAWL page:

• The latest version, NAWL 1.2, has 957 words and is designed to work with NGSL 1.2. The first version had 963.
• Together, the NGSL and NAWL give about 92% coverage of a 288 million word academic corpus.
• It is described as an update and replacement for Averil Coxhead’s Academic Word List (AWL).

The AWL was published in TESOL Quarterly in 2000 (Coxhead, 2000). It was designed to sit on top of the GSL, so once the base list became the NGSL, the academic list needed rebuilding as well. The NAWL page says the NGSL and NAWL together give 5% more coverage than the GSL and AWL together.

Spoken English and the other lists

The same project also has NGSL-Spoken. According to the NGSL-Spoken page, the latest version, 1.2 from October 2017, has 721 words and provides up to 90% coverage of unscripted spoken English. It was built from the spoken parts of the NGSL corpus.

There are others, including the TSL for TOEIC and the BSL for business English, all updated to version 1.2.

The licence

The NGSL, NAWL and NGSL-Spoken are all released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-SA 4.0). Anyone can use, share and adapt them, as long as they credit the authors and release any adapted version under the same licence.

Because the lists are free to use, textbooks and apps can share the same standard. Whatever materials you use, you can talk about “a word in the NGSL” with everyone meaning the same thing, which helps learners as well.

What knowing the NGSL lets you read

92% coverage means about 8 unknown words in every 100. That is still not enough to enjoy a novel without a dictionary. How many words you need for that is in How Many English Words Do You Need to Read a Novel?

Even so, if you know the NGSL’s 2,800 or so words, you know most of the words in ordinary English text. The unknown words are concentrated in the remaining 8%, so you look up fewer words and find it easier to judge whether a word you look up is worth learning. The NGSL can be seen less as a word book to memorise from start to finish and more as a map of the base you want to have solid.

Who the NAWL is for

The NAWL suits people who will study in English: students going to university abroad, graduate students reading research in English, and anyone preparing for IELTS or TOEFL. It contains words such as empirical, methodology, correlation and parameter, which turn up in research papers whatever the field.

The NAWL is built on top of the NGSL, though. Moving on to the NAWL while the NGSL words are still shaky won’t make research papers readable. The order is NGSL first, then NAWL.

How to use the lists

A list does not have to be memorised from word one. Learning 2,800 words cut off from any sentence is hard, and few people keep it up.

One alternative is to use the list as a check:

1. Go through the list and mark the words whose meaning doesn’t come to you at once.
2. When you meet one of those words in a book, learn it together with that sentence.
3. Go back to the list now and then and see whether the marked words are getting fewer.

Words you meet in a book come with a sentence to remember them by. How to build a word book from your own reading is in Build Your English Vocabulary Notebook from Your Own Reading.

Using the lists in ABC George

I make ABC George, a free app for iPhone and iPad that lets you read Project Gutenberg classics with a built-in dictionary. It has no ads and no in-app purchases.

In the Words tab, the Word Book has NGSL, NAWL and NGSL-Spoken tabs next to My words. The words in each list are numbered, each with a short plain-English definition, and a speaker button lets you hear them. The app has 2,801 words for the NGSL, 963 for the NAWL and 721 for NGSL-Spoken. The NGSL and NAWL counts are those of versions before the current 1.2.

Tap a word in a list and the same dictionary sheet opens as when you are reading. With Save every lookup turned on in Settings, which is the default, the word goes into My words and starts coming up in quizzes. That is the “mark the words” step above, done inside the app.

When you long-press a word while reading and tap Look up, words on these lists show an “In plain English” definition first, followed by the WordNet senses. Getting used to English-English definitions is in When to Start Using an English-English Dictionary, and how saved words come back for review is in What Is the Leitner System?

The dictionary and the lists are inside the app, so they work offline. Getting Started with ABC George walks through your first book.