Academic Word List (AWL) - EAP Foundation

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This page describes the Academic Word List (AWL), giving information on what the AWL is, as well as a complete list of all words in the AWL. The list is rather static. More dynamic tools for understanding and using the AWL words can be found in other sections of the website, namely the AWL highlighter and gapfill maker, AWL tag cloud and gapfill maker, the AWL finder, and a vocabulary profiler. Other pages also contain information on how to use word lists as well as more detailed information on the main different word lists available for academic study.

What is the AWL?

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The Academic Word List (AWL), developed by Averil Coxhead at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, contains 570 word families which frequently appear in academic texts, but which are not contained in the General Service List (GSL). When compiling the list, the author found that the AWL covers around 10% of words in academic texts; if you are familiar with words in the GSL, which covers around 80% of words in written texts, you would have knowledge of approximately 90% of words in academic texts. The words in the AWL are not connected with any particular subject, meaning they are useful for all students.

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The 570 word families of the AWL are divided into 10 lists (called sublists) according to how frequent they are. Sublist 1 has the most frequent word families, sublist 2 the next most frequent word families, up to sublist 10, which has the least frequent. Each sublist contains 60 word families, except for sublist 10, which only has 30.

The list below contains all 570 headwords in the AWL, along with sublist number, and related word forms. All words contain hyperlinks to the Wordnet dictionary, hosted on this site (definitions open in an alert box on the same page).

There is a downloadable copy of this list, with study guidance, in the vocabulary resources section.