A General Service List of English Words

The General Service List (GSL) (West. 1953) is a set of 2,000 words selected to be of the greatest “general service” to learners of English. They are not the most common 2,000 words, though frequency was one of the factors taken into account in making the selection. Each of the 2,000 words is a headword representing a word family that is only loosely defined in West. Frequency numbers are given, derived from Thorndike and Lorge (1944). Frequency data is also given for the various meanings of words. The list given here was created by John Bauman and Brent Culligan in early 1995. We wanted a version of the GSL ranked in frequency order. In order to address the above problems, we adapted two authorities. To determine which words to include as forms related to a headword, we used the standard set out in Bauer and Nation (1995). This article uses various criteria to group derived forms into word families. Related words are ranked into levels. Words related by levels 1 to 4 are grouped under a headword on this list, and the frequency numbers are added. To determine the frequency of a words, we used the frequency numbers from the Brown Corpus (Frances and Kucera, 1982). Using these criteria, the GSL ends up as 2284 words.