NEW DOLCH LIST 1.0

Every step in chicken road game gambling increases your potential payout—but also your risk. It’s a tension-filled balance that rewards smart, strategic play and timely cashouts.

The New Dolch List, (NDL) was developed by Dr. Charles Browne and Dr. Brent Culligan (2020) with the goal of creating a reliable and valid corpus-based list of high frequency English words important for young second language learners to be able to successfully interact with EFL learning materials, other EFL learners, as well as popular children’s TV shows and children’s picture books.

The original Dolch word list is a list of frequently used English words compiled by Edward William Dolch. The list was first published in a journal article in 1936 and then published in his book Problems in Reading in 1948. Dolch based the list on several criteria including a corpus of children’s books of his era, which is why nouns such as “kitty” and “Santa Claus” appear on the list instead of more high-frequency words. The list contains 220 “sight words” that have to be easily recognized in order to achieve reading fluency in the English language. The compilation excludes nouns, which comprise a separate 95-word list. It has been argued that between 50% and 75% of all words used in schoolbooks, library books, newspapers, and magazines are a part of the Dolch basic sight word vocabulary. Though dated, the Dolch lists are still widely assigned for memorization in American elementary schools and used in ESL and EFL settings and materials around the world. Although most of the 220 Dolch words are phonetic, children are sometimes told that they can’t be “sounded out” using common sound-to-letter implicit phonics patterns and have to be learned by sight; hence the alternative term, “sight word”. The list is divided according to the grades in which it was intended that children would memorize these words.

A wordlist is only as good as the corpus it is based on. Like the West’s 1953 General Service List (GSL), which was replaced by the New General Service List (2013, Browne, Culligan and Phillips), the Dolch 1936 list has often been criticized for being based on outdated resources. The English language changes and evolves over time and an update to the 90 year old Dolch list is long overdue.

The Dolch list was based on a corpus and word lists designed only for native speakers of English attending primary school in English speaking countries. English is now taught and studied as a second language in countries around the globe and the original Dolch list was not designed with these needs in mind.  EFL learners do not get as much input in English as those living in English speaking countries and the sources of input are more limited. EFL textbooks, children’s songs, children’s textbooks and children’s TV shows are usually the primary sources of input for most EFL learners and we have created a corpus of such materials to generate a list of the most important words for EFL learners in the hopes that this would be a valuable asset to EFL teachers, students, textbook authors and educational software developers around the world.

The 315 words of the original Dolch word list (220 “sight words” plus 95 nouns) were said to offer 70% coverage (though there are no empirical papers to verify this claim). If we look at the NDL, we can see that at 315 words, coverage is already at 78%:

In order to help students, schools and teachers get closer to the coverage levels needed to read and guess unknown words from context more easily, the NDL list was extended to 875 words, which offers 90% coverage for most EFL materials for young learners.

The NDL is based on a carefully selected 2.5 million word corpus of children’s reading and listening materials as follows:

As with our NGSL and other word lists, we will be working hard to create and support the creation of a wide range of free tools for students, teachers, researchers and materials developers to better utilise the NDL. The NDL is made available to you under the least restrictive Creative Commons license, meaning you are free to use or modify the list in any way you see fit as long as you give proper citation to the authors of the list.

If you create a useful online tool with the NDL, please let us know so we can post a link and help spread the word.

NDL Tools:

Downloadable for the NDL 1.0 word list:

1. Downloadable NDL 1.0 list (alphabetized) with brief explanation of corpus

2. Downloadable NDL 1.0 list (alphabetized) lemmatized for research purposes

3. Downloadable NDL 1.0 list (alphabetized) lemmatized for teaching purposes

4. Downloadable NDL 1.0 (SFI and frequencies sorted by frequency)

5. Downloadable NDL 1.0 (rank order) with definitions in easy English

Links for the NDL 1.0 word list:

1. NDL on VocabProfile text analysis tool (coming soon)

2. NDL on OGTE text analysis tool (coming soon)

3. Link to free NDL flashcards on Quizlet with English definitions (coming soon)

4. Link to free NDL flashcards on Memrise with English definitions (coming soon)

5. Link to free NDL glossary including YouGlish in-context video concordance (coming soon)

NOTES:

Thanks to Paul Bryan for noticing that two forms of “may” were accidentally included in the first draft of the NDL. The month “May” has now been excluded and the word “peek” added at 875.

ACNOWLEDGMENTS:

We greatly appreciate additional funding for the development of the NDL from Harry Hill, and also the hard work of Scott Crowe for adding parts of speech for all NDL words.

New Dolch List by Browne, C. and Culligan, B. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://www.charlie-browne.com.