The New Academic WordList (NAWL)

New Academic Word List 1.2

The NAWL 1.2 is a 957 word list of the most important words for general academic English and designed to work in conjunction with the NGSL 1.2 and is an update and replacement for Averil Coxhead’s excellent Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000). The replacement of the original AWL was needed since (1) the number of words in the NGSL is different than the number of words in the original GSL by West (1953), (2) word units in the NGSL Project are modified lexeme sets (or flemmas) rather than the word family approach used by the AWL and (3) we hoped to attain higher coverage than the list it replaces.

When the NGSL and NAWL are learned together, they give about 92% coverage for our 288 million word academic corpus, 5% higher than the original GSL and AWL. Recent research shows that these coverage figures are quite high out in the real world as well, with the NGSL and NAWL providing 90% coverage for a 5 million word corpus of over 18,000 academic journal abstracts from a wide range of disciplines (Hendry and Sheepy, 2018).

Below is a snapshot of the makeup of the corpus:

NOTE: With regard to our free NAWL online tools, please note that some tools will be available only with the older NAWL 1.01 version (Quizlet and the NGSL Builder flashcard app) while other tools will be available only with the new NAWL 1.2 version (Wordle, Crossword Puzzles, Word Search, Online Graded Text Editor, VocabProfile and the Word-Learner app).

NAWL 1.2 Downloadable Word Lists:

Please note that NAWL frequency data is included only in the “NAWL 1.2 with basic statistics file”.

  1. NAWL 1.2 list with basic statistics (includes frequency rankings)

  2. NAWL 1.2 alphabetized

  3. NAWL 1.2 alphabetized and lemmatized for teaching

  4. NAWL 1.2 alphabetized and lemmatized for research

  5. NAWL 1.2 list with definitions in easy English

NAWL 1.2 Teaching, Learning & Content Development Tools:

  1. NAWL 1.2 Learning Dictionary functions include:

    • Video Concordance for Each Word

    • Links to 6 Dictionaries for Each Word

    • Links to Multiple Pronunciations for Each Word

  2. NAWL 1.2 on OGTE for text editing and content analysis (1.2 update soon)

  3. NAWL 1.2 on VocabProfile for content analysis (1.2 update soon)

  4. NAWL 1.2 Word-Learner app with gamification & LMS (1.2 update soon)

New Academic Word List 1.01

The NAWL 1.01 is the archive version of the NGSL, which was widely used from 2013 through 2023. Many tools, apps and textbooks still use the NAWL 1.01 so these resources will continue to be made available via the links below.

NAWL 1.01 Teaching, Learning & Content Development Tools:

  1. NAWL 1.01 Quizlet flashcards (50 word blocks)

  2. NAWL 1.01 Memrise flashcards

  3. NAWL 1.01 free flashcard app with spaced-repetition

    • For iOS

    • For Android (no longer supported)

CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE

  • New Academic Word List by Browne, C., Culligan, B., and Phillips, J. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

  • Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.charlie-browne.com