The new-GSL is an English vocabulary baseline intended for both researchers and practitioners. It is based on robust comparison of four corpora of general English of the total size of over 12 billion words. It contains 2,494 vocabulary items, 2,116 of which belong to a stable lexical core; 378 words in the wordlist represent lexical innovations. All of these words appear with high frequencies across a large number of different contexts.

The article, which describes the methodology of the wordlist compilation, as well as the full new-GSL are available from the Applied Linguistics website in the open access mode.

Further research

At the moment, we are working on an American supplement to the new-GSL. Our findings show that there is a surprisingly large overlap between frequent lexical items in British and American corpora. With some modifications, the new-GSL can therefore be successfully used also in the American English contexts.

A larger question, however, that the new-GSL raises is – how do we reconcile our intuitions about important vocabulary items with the corpus-based findings? In this respect, the new-GSL is not a prescriptive but a descriptive wordlist. As we stress in the article, “[w]ith respect to the diversity of ESL/EFL contexts, it is deemed more useful to envision the use of our wordlist as a vocabulary base with the possibility of further additions, rather than a wordlist that strives to cater to a mixed cluster of heterogeneous expectations and needs” (p. 19).

Read more:

Brezina, V. and Gablasova, D. (2013) Is There a Core General Vocabulary? Introducing the New General Service List.  Applied Linguistics.