Academic Vocabulary Lists
Based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English

This site contains academic vocabulary lists of English that are based on 120 million words of academic texts in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). There are important differences between these lists and the Academic Word List created by Coxhead (2000), and we believe that the lists that you will find here are the most accurate and useful academic word lists currently available.

Until recently, it was possible to download the list, but there were a couple of unfortunate cases where people took our lists and tried to publish journal articles based on them, as though they had created the lists. As a result, they are currently offline until we publish our article containing the lists.

In the meantime, you are welcome to take a look at some samples of the list, and you can also search and browse through portions of the lists online. The online interface allows you to see useful information about each word -- its definition, the frequency in each of the nine academic sub-genres (e.g. Medicine, Science, or Business), the collocates (nearby words, which give great insight into word meaning and usage), and many re-sortable concordance lines for each word, which show the patterns in which the word occurs.

Mark Davies and Dee Gardner, BYU