Contracts Word List

The Contracts Word List contains lemmas that are both prevalent and specialized in U.S. business contracts (2000-2022).

The main CWL contains 684 lemmas that are prevalent and specialized across all contract types. Each lemma is accompanied by its part of speech, definition (adapted from Black’s Law Dictionary), three examples of use from authentic contracts, and frequency information (adjusted frequency calculated by dividing the lemma’s mean text frequency by its dispersion, total frequency per million words across all 6 contract subtypes, frequency per million words in business assurance contracts, frequency per million words in business management contracts, frequency per million words in employment contracts, frequency per million words in investment management contracts, frequency per million words in leasing and loan financing contracts, and frequency per million words in sales-related contracts).

These lists have been validated by computing stability confidence intervals through bootstrapping, calculating percent coverage statistics, and conducting qualitative situational analyses of each (sub)register.

See also the CWL+, which contains lemmas that are distinctive of each of the 54 individual contract sub-types. On this site, they are divided into groups of sub-lists for business management contracts, business assurance contracts, employment contracts, investment management contracts, leasing and loan financing contracts, and sales-related contracts.