BNC/COCA Headword Lists

The BNC/COCA lists are designed primarily for learners of English as a foreign language. Lists designed for learners of English as a foreign language need to reflect opportunities for use (foreign travel, study in English, the internet) and opportunities for learning (graded readers and course books), making sure that words needed for these purposes occur early in the lists.

The 1st 1000 and 2nd 1000 word family lists
The first two 1000 word family lists were made using a specially designed 10 million token corpus. Six million tokens of this corpus were spoken English from both British and American English (see Corpus/PN corpus for 2000) as well as movies and TV programs. The written sections included texts for young children and fiction.

This unusual step of creating a special corpus for the first 2000 word families was followed because the previous lists made from the British National Corpus (BNC) were so strongly influenced by the written formal nature of the BNC corpus that they were not suitable lists for creating language courses or graded reader lists (see Nation, 2004). Very common words in spoken English like alright, pardon, hello, dad, bye could then be included in the high frequency words. Other arbitrary adjustments included putting all the word forms of numbers (one, two, hundred) and weekdays in the 1st 1000, and the months of the year in the 2nd 1000, even though their frequency did not always justify this. The goal was to have a set of high frequency word lists that were suitable for teaching English as a foreign language and language course design.

The 3rd 1000 onwards
The remaining 1000 lists were made by using COCA/BNC rankings in data kindly provided by Mark Davies (Davies COCA BNC.xls) after removing the specially created first 2000 word families.