WordieThe Academic Word List: What It Is, Sample Words From All 10 Sublists, and How to Learn It
Averil Coxhead's Academic Word List is one of the most widely used vocabulary lists in English language teaching. Here is what it contains, why it works, where it falls short, and a practical way to learn it.
- The Academic Word List (AWL), published by Averil Coxhead in 2000, contains 570 word families that are frequent across academic texts but not among the most common 2,000 English words.
- The AWL is divided into 10 sublists by frequency: sublists 1–9 have 60 families each and sublist 10 has 30. Sublist 1 holds the most frequent words.
- AWL words make up roughly 10% of the running words in typical academic texts, which is why they matter so much for IELTS, TOEFL and university reading.
- The Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) by Gardner and Davies (2014) is a newer alternative based on a much larger corpus and organized by lemma rather than word family.
- Learn AWL words as word families with collocations and example sentences, one sublist every one to two weeks, with spaced active-recall review.
The Academic Word List (AWL) is a list of 570 word families that appear frequently across academic texts in many subjects but are not among the 2,000 most common English words. It was compiled by Averil Coxhead and published in 2000, and it is divided into 10 sublists by frequency. If you are preparing for IELTS, TOEFL or university study in English, the AWL is one of the most efficient vocabulary investments you can make, especially when learned with collocations and example sentences.
What is the Academic Word List?
Coxhead built the AWL from a corpus of about 3.5 million words of academic writing, drawn from four broad areas (arts, commerce, law and science) and covering 28 subject fields. To make the list, a word family had to meet three conditions:
- It was not in the first 2,000 words of the General Service List (West, 1953), so very common words like study or result are excluded.
- It appeared a minimum number of times across the corpus as a whole.
- It appeared across many subject areas, not just in one field. This is what makes the list "general academic" rather than technical.
The result is a compact list of words such as analyze, concept, derive, hypothesis and significant: words that a chemistry textbook, a law article and a history essay all share. Coxhead reported that AWL words account for roughly 10% of the running words in academic texts. Combined with the most common 2,000 words, that takes a reader a long way toward the high lexical coverage needed for comfortable reading.
Word families, not single words
Each AWL entry is a word family: a headword plus its inflections and common derivations. The family for analyze includes analysis, analyst, analytic, analytical, analytically and others. That is why 570 families add up to several thousand individual word forms, and why studying the family as a unit is so useful for exams that test word formation.
The 10 AWL sublists, with sample words
The sublists are ordered by frequency. Sublist 1 contains the 60 most frequent families, Sublist 2 the next 60, and so on. Sublist 10 contains the remaining 30. The table shows six headwords from each sublist.
| Sublist | Families | Sample headwords |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 60 | analyze, concept, data, establish, significant, theory |
| 2 | 60 | achieve, aspect, evaluate, impact, perceive, strategy |
| 3 | 60 | alternative, component, demonstrate, framework, imply, sufficient |
| 4 | 60 | adequate, emerge, hypothesis, implement, mechanism, subsequent |
| 5 | 60 | capacity, facilitate, fundamental, notion, perspective, sustain |
| 6 | 60 | acknowledge, allocate, explicit, incorporate, inhibit, underlie |
| 7 | 60 | comprehensive, empirical, infer, paradigm, phenomenon, ultimate |
| 8 | 60 | ambiguous, arbitrary, bias, contradict, fluctuate, inevitable |
| 9 | 60 | anticipate, coherent, diminish, inherent, preliminary, scenario |
| 10 | 30 | albeit, conceive, intrinsic, notwithstanding, persist, whereby |
The full list, with all family members, is freely available from Victoria University of Wellington, where Coxhead developed it.
Example sentences from across the sublists
- establish (1): The study aimed to establish whether sleep affects word learning.
- evaluate (2): Participants were asked to evaluate three teaching methods.
- imply (3): The results imply that earlier estimates were too low.
- subsequent (4): Subsequent research confirmed the effect in older adults.
- facilitate (5): Clear headings facilitate skimming.
- underlie (6): Several factors underlie the decline in reading habits.
- empirical (7): The theory has strong empirical support.
- inevitable (8): Some loss of detail is inevitable in a summary.
- preliminary (9): Preliminary findings should be treated with caution.
- albeit (10): The method worked, albeit more slowly than expected.
How to study the Academic Word List
The AWL is a list, but it should not be learned like a list of isolated translations. Research on vocabulary learning, from Nation's work on vocabulary size and coverage to Webb's (2007) study of repeated encounters, consistently shows that meaning, form and use all need attention. A practical approach:
- Check what you already know. Go through a sublist and mark each word: know well, recognize, or unknown. Only study the last two groups.
- Learn the family and a collocation. For significant: significance, significantly, insignificant, plus a significant increase and statistically significant. See our guide on learning collocations.
- Find the word in real text. Search for it in academic articles or quality journalism and copy a sentence you understand. Words met in context are easier to remember and use correctly.
- Test yourself. Look at the word and recall its meaning, or look at a sentence with the word blanked and recall the word. Active recall beats rereading.
- Review on a spaced schedule. Revisit each word after about 1, 3, 7 and 21 days. The spaced repetition scheduler can plan the dates for you.
- Use it. Write three to five sentences a week using recent AWL words, ideally in essays or summaries you are already writing.
Step 3 is where Wordie can help if you do your reading in Chrome: select an AWL word in an article to see its definition and synonyms, save it, and it is highlighted the next time it appears on another site, so you notice repeated encounters you would otherwise miss. To see which AWL-type words appear most often in your own course readings, paste a text into the word frequency counter.
A sample study schedule
| Period | Sublists | Pace |
|---|---|---|
| Weeks 1–2 | 1 | About 6 new families a day; many will be partly familiar |
| Weeks 3–4 | 2 | 6 a day plus review of Sublist 1 |
| Weeks 5–8 | 3–4 | One sublist every two weeks |
| Weeks 9–14 | 5–7 | One sublist every two weeks; start writing summaries with target words |
| Weeks 15–18 | 8–10 | Sublist 10 is half size, so this phase is lighter |
Adjust the pace with the vocabulary goal planner. Exam candidates with less time should prioritize Sublists 1–5, which contain the most frequent families.
Limitations of the AWL
The AWL has been extremely influential, but it is worth knowing its weaknesses:
- Corpus size and age. 3.5 million words was substantial in the late 1990s but is small by modern standards.
- Dependence on the General Service List. Excluding the GSL's first 2,000 words means that some words which are very frequent in academic writing are missing simply because they were already on an older general list.
- Word families can hide differences. Members of a family can differ in frequency and meaning, and learners do not automatically know every member.
- Discipline variation. Later research found that some AWL words are much more frequent in certain fields than in others, so the list fits some subjects better than others.
Newer alternatives to the Academic Word List
| List | Authors and year | Key features | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Academic Word List (AWL) | Coxhead, 2000 | 570 word families in 10 sublists; excludes the first 2,000 GSL words | A compact, well-supported core; most exam prep materials use it |
| Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) | Gardner & Davies, 2014 | Around 3,000 lemmas from the academic portion of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (about 120 million words); does not exclude general high-frequency words | Learners who want a larger, more modern list based on American academic English |
| New Academic Word List (NAWL) | Browne, Culligan & Phillips, 2013 | Designed to be used alongside the New General Service List | Learners already using the NGSL |
| Academic Collocation List | Ackermann & Chen, 2013 | Common academic word combinations such as play a role and key factor | Writing and speaking, where collocation accuracy matters |
For most learners, the choice is less important than consistent study. The AWL is a good starting point because it is small and supported by many textbooks; the AVL makes sense if you want a broader, corpus-updated list, particularly for American academic contexts.
Which exams use AWL vocabulary?
No major exam publishes the AWL as its official list, but academic reading and listening passages draw heavily on this kind of vocabulary. It is particularly useful for the IELTS Academic module, the TOEFL iBT, the Duolingo English Test, and the tier-2 words tested on the digital SAT.
Conclusion
The Academic Word List gives you 570 word families that appear across nearly every academic subject. Work through the 10 sublists in order, learn each word as a family with a collocation and a real example sentence, test yourself regularly and use the words in your own writing. When you have finished, newer lists such as the Academic Vocabulary List can extend your coverage further.
Sources: Coxhead, A. (2000), "A New Academic Word List", TESOL Quarterly; Gardner, D. & Davies, M. (2014), "A New Academic Vocabulary List", Applied Linguistics; West, M. (1953), A General Service List of English Words; Browne, C., Culligan, B. & Phillips, J. (2013), New Academic Word List; Ackermann, K. & Chen, Y.-H. (2013), "Developing the Academic Collocation List", Journal of English for Academic Purposes; Webb, S. (2007), Applied Linguistics; Nation, I.S.P. (2006), Canadian Modern Language Review.
Frequently asked questions
How many words are in the Academic Word List?
The AWL contains 570 word families. Because each family includes several related forms (for example analyze, analysis, analytical, analyst), the total number of individual word forms is several thousand.
What is AWL Sublist 1?
Sublist 1 contains the 60 most frequent AWL word families, such as analyze, approach, assess, concept, data, define, establish, factor, identify, method, significant and theory. It is the best place to start.
Is the Academic Word List still useful?
Yes, as a compact core of general academic vocabulary. Its limitations are that it is based on a relatively small corpus from the late 1990s and excludes words from older high-frequency lists, so some useful academic words are missing. Newer lists such as the AVL address these issues.
What is the difference between the AWL and the AVL?
The AWL (Coxhead, 2000) lists 570 word families from a 3.5-million-word corpus and excludes the most common 2,000 English words. The AVL (Gardner & Davies, 2014) lists around 3,000 lemmas from the roughly 120-million-word academic portion of the Corpus of Contemporary American English and does not exclude general high-frequency words.
How long does it take to learn the Academic Word List?
At one sublist every one to two weeks, you can work through the whole AWL in about three to five months. Most intermediate learners already partly know many Sublist 1 and 2 words, which speeds up the early stages.
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