The most important words of English — and everything you need to teach them.
Free, corpus-based word lists and the tools to teach with them — research-validated and used worldwide since 2013.
What is this?
Ten word lists
The core list is 2,809 words and covers 92% of everyday English. Six special-purpose lists extend it for academic, business, TOEIC, medical, fitness and biblical English. Three more stand alone: spoken English, children's English, and graded readers.
Free tools
An interactive learning dictionary linked to authentic videos, a text profiler for checking level, placement and diagnostic tests, flashcards, puzzles and games. Plus several new AI tools applying the lists to story creation and vocabulary practice.
Open since 2013
Free under Creative Commons, including commercial use. No accounts, no paywalls, no ads. Used by teachers, students, publishers and researchers in more than 90 countries.
The Word Lists
Start with the core list. Add what you need.
Every list is built from a large corpus and offers the highest coverage available for its purpose. The New General Service List is the core: 2,809 words covering roughly 92% of everyday English. From there, add the list that matches your learners' goals — academic, business, TOEIC, medical, fitness, or Bible English — to push coverage in that domain higher still.
Three further lists work independently: NGSL-Spoken for conversation, the New Dolch List for children's English, and NGSL-Graded Reader for developing graded readers.
New! Free AI tools built on our lists
I've built a growing set of AI-powered tools that apply the word lists to everyday classroom problems — generating stories at a chosen level, building productive vocabulary through guided practice, creating readable stories for young learners, and simplifying or generating texts inside the NGSL Profiler.
These are early tools, built on established pedagogical principles. They'll keep evolving, and there will be more. What makes them different from general-purpose AI is that they work from the actual word lists rather than a model's guess at what's difficult.
Research-validated and used worldwide
I've presented this work at conferences around the world — two TEDx talks, in 2015 and 2024, and more than 100 plenary or keynote addresses. The lists have been the subject of independent research and are cited in academic work.
This site has drawn more than 380,000 visits since 2023, over 109,000 in 2025 alone, from visitors in more than 90 countries. The lists are built into products at companies including GoFluent, EnglishCentral and Cooori.
Zipf’s law and its application to the NGSL Project…
On June 9, 2024, Dr. Browne gave a TEDx Talk titled "Zipf’s Law: Core Words for English language learning success…" which explains how we use Zipf’s Law, a model of frequency distribution to develop our many wordlists while also explaining the greatly expanded scope (and impact) of the NGSL Project.
A frequent public speaker, Dr. Browne has given 2 TEDx talks and more than 50 conference plenary or keynote addresses on the NGSL Project and is available to speak at your conference or school as well.
The New General Service List Project is a collection of high-frequency English vocabulary resources, based on corpus linguistics research. Designed for ESL/EFL learners, teachers, and content developers, it emphasizes practicality and real-world relevance, making it an essential tool for rapid second language acquisition.
Our core wordlist is called the New General Service List (NGSL), which is a list of the most important, foundational words of general English for second language learners. Building on the excellent work of Michael West and his colleagues, who in 1953 published the General Service List (GSL), we have expanded, modernized and improved upon their research to publish the NGSL in 2013 (Browne, 2013). Based on a 273 million word subset of the Cambridge English Corpus, and updated in 2016 and 2023, the 2809 words of the NGSL 1.2 offer far more coverage with far fewer words than the original GSL, and is part of our growing collection of free, open-source wordlists (seven as of 2023). Each list offers the highest coverage in the world for that genre, and is accompanied by a large number of free online learning, teaching and content creation tools.
Explore the site, download and use what you need, and be sure to contact us to give us ideas how to add and improve on the lists and tools we make.
“I credit my systematic study of the NAWL wordlist using their free flashcard app with my success getting into and doing well in graduate school.”
— Riho, Graduate Student in TESOL and Applied Linguistics
A Brief Introduction to the NGSL & NAWL lists…
Early in the history of the NGSL Project, on October 10, 2015, Dr. Browne gave a TEDx Talk titled "Not All Words are Created Equal" which explained the efficiency of our first 2 published wordlists, the NGSL and NAWL in helping 2nd language learners forward as well as to the several free online NGSL resources we had created. at the time. Although we have gone on to create many new wordlist and learning tools, and revised and improved our methods and techniques including use of AI, the vision outlined in this 10 minute talk still holds true today.
A frequent public speaker, Dr. Browne has given 2 TEDx talks and more than 50 conference plenary or keynote addresses on the NGSL Project and is available to speak at your conference or school as well.
The Importance of Coverage in Vocabulary Learning
Vocabulary research shows that it is essential for students to know a minimum of 90% of the words they read or listen to in order to comprehend without the help of a dictionary or teacher. All NGSL wordlists provide a minimum of 92% coverage.
A Modular Approach to Vocabulary Development
Our goal is to create the shortest, most efficient paths for students to reach the important vocabulary thresholds they need to succeed. Each of our lists is short, each offers 90% or more coverage for that genre, and many of them can be combined together to meet the needs of your students and your language learning program.