A General Service List of English Words

The General Service List is a list of roughly 2000 words published by Michael West in 1953. The words were selected to represent the most frequent words of English and were taken from a corpus of written English. The target audience was English language learners and ESL teachers. To maximize the utility of the list, some frequent words that overlapped broadly in meaning with words already on the list were omitted. In the original publication the relative frequencies of various senses of the words were also included.

The list is important because a person who knows all the words on the list and their related families would understand approximately 90-95 percent of colloquial speech and 80-85 percent of common written texts. The list consists only of headwords, which means that the word "be" is high on the list, but assumes that the person is fluent in all forms of the word, e.g. am, is, are, was, were, being and been.

Researchers have expressed doubts about the adequacy of the GSL because of its age and the relatively low coverage provided by the words not in the first 1000 words of the list (Engels, 1968). Engels was, in particular, critical of the limited vocabulary chosen by West 1953, and while he concurred that the first 1000 words of the GSL were good selections based on their high frequency and wide range, he was of the opinion that that the words beyond the first 1000 of the GSL could not be considered general service words because the range and frequency of these words were too low to be included in the list. Recent research by Billuroğlu and Neufeld (2005) confirmed that the General Service List was in need of minor revision, but the headwords in the list still provide approximately 80% text coverage in written English. The research showed that the GSL contains a small number of archaic terms, such as shilling, while excluding words that have gained currency since the first half of the twentieth century, e.g. plastic, television, battery, okay, victim, drug, etc.

The GSL evolved over several decades before West’s publication in 1953. Contrary to popular belief, the GSL is not a list based solely on frequency, but includes groups of words on a semantic basis (Nation & Waring, 2004; Dickins). Today there is no version of the GSL in print; it only exists in virtual form via the Internet. Various versions float around the Internet, and attempts have been made to improve it (Bauman, 1995). However, for practical purposes, one of its most accessible formats exists in the Compleat Lexical Tutor web site created by Tom Cobb, where it can be viewed, downloaded or used for vocabulary profiling of texts. The headwords and family members in this version of the GSL conform to Bauer and Nation, level 6.

The Classic Vocabulary Profiler, produces output in coloured form—blue for K1 (the first 1,000 words of the GSL), green for K2 (the second 1,000 words of the GSL), yellow for Academic word list, and red for words that are not in any of the lists.

For other types of reading different lists may be required. For example when reading texts in the academic genre, a person may wish to consult the Academic word list. For students studying English as a foreign language, a person may wish to consult the BNL2709 and use the BNL profiler at the Compleat Lexical Tutor web site.