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This page describes the New Academic Word List (NAWL), giving information on what the NAWL is, as well as a complete list of all words in the NAWL.

To explore the list more fully, try the NAWL highlighter (on this site).

What is the NAWL?

The New Academic Word List (NAWL), developed by Dr. Charles Browne, Dr. Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips in 2013, is a list of 963 words which frequently appear in academic texts, but which are not contained in the New General Service List (NGSL). The NAWL was developed based on a study of a 288 million word academic corpus, consisting of academic journals, non-fiction, student essays, academic discourse, and best selling academic textbooks. The NGSL and NAWL in combination give 92% coverage of words from that corpus (86% for the NGSL and 6% for the NAWL).

While the New Academic Word List (NAWL) is similar to the Academic Word List (AWL), there are several differences. One is that it is more up-to-date. It was designed as an extension of the New General Service List (NGSL), in the same way that the AWL was designed as an extension of the General Service List (GSL). However, while the AWL itself is relatively new (devised in 2000), the GSL it was based on dates from 1953, and is significantly outdated when compared to the NGSL, which, like the NAWL, was developed in 2013 (by the same three researchers).

A second difference is coverage. As noted above, the NGSL and NAWL in combination give 92% coverage for the corpus used. This contrasts with only 87% for the GSL and AWL for the same corpus.

A final difference is the presentation of the words. The NAWL includes only inflected forms or variant spellings of words, rather than whole word families, meaning that although it has more headwords than the AWL (963 compared to 570), it has fewer word forms overall (2604 compared to 3112). Many of these word forms are added for completeness (for the benefit of researchers) and are not intended for study (e.g. plurals such as approximatings and compensatings). Additionally, the words are presented as a single list, in contrast to the AWL which is presented in 10 sublists based on frequency.

References

Browne, C., Culligan, B. and Phillips, J. (2013) The New Academic Word List. Available at: http://www.newgeneralservicelist.org/nawl-new-academic-word-list/ (Access date 13/8/19).

New Academic Word List: Dispersion

The list below contains all 963 headwords in the NAWL, along with related word forms, ordered by dispersion. Standard frequency index (SFI), estimated frequency per million words (U) and dispersion (D) are all shown. The first two are related measures of frequency (higher SFI means higher U, and means the word is more frequent), while dispersion (D) shows how evenly the words are distributed among academic texts (scores closer to 1 mean the word is more equally distributed, and therefore likely to be encountered more regularly, while scores closer to 0 mean the word occurs in fewer different texts, and is therefore likely to be encountered less regularly).

Words contain hyperlinks to the Wordnet dictionary, hosted on this site (definitions open in an alert box on the same page).

NOTE: As this list is intended for study rather than research purposes, additional (generally rule-based, non-existent plurals) are removed. This reduces the number of words from 2604 to 2198. For a complete list, including those words (alphabetical only), please click here.

There is also a copy of the list in alphabetical order, and another copy according to frequency.