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

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

What is the MAVL?

The Medical Academic Vocabulary List (MAVL) was developed by Lei Lei and Liu Dilin in 2015, based on a study of a 2.7 million-word corpus of medical academic English and a 3.5 million-word corpus of medical English textbooks. The coverage of the MAVL in the two corpuses was 19.44% and 20.18% respectively.

The MAVL can be contrasted with the earlier Medical Academic Word List (MAWL), developed in 2008, in four ways. First, unlike the MAWL, which used only medical academic English texts, the MAVL used both medical academic English texts alongside medical English textbooks to develop the list. Second, the MAVL considered all words in English, whereas the MAWL, like most other academic lists, eliminated higher frequency general words, in the same way that the Academic Word List was developed by Averil Coxhead by first eliminating words from the GSL. The MAVL included general words since many such words have a higher frequency in academic English than general English and frequently have special meanings in academic contexts, making them potentially more important for inclusion in a specialist academic list. In this regard, it is similar to the AVL (Academic Vocabulary List), developed by Gardner and Davies in 2014, from which it derives its name. A third difference is that the MAVL includes only lemmas (i.e. words and their inflected forms such as plurals or verb forms), rather than whole word families, which makes the list much shorter, with fewer than half as many total words as the MAWL. A fourth and final difference is greater coverage, with the MAVL covering 19.44% of words in medical academic English texts, compared to 10.52% for the MAWL, and 20.18% of words in medical English textbooks, in contrast to 12.97% for the MAWL.

References

Lei, L., Liu, D. (2016) 'A new medical academic word list: A corpus-based study with enhanced methodology', Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Vol 22, p.42-53.

Medical Academic Vocabulary List

The list below contains all 819 words in the MAVL, along with word form, and lemmas (i.e. inflected forms such as plurals and verb forms). Words contain hyperlinks to the Wordnet dictionary, hosted on this site (definitions open in an alert box on the same page).