The Academic Vocabulary List
Mark Davies and Dee Gardner, Brigham Young University
Sample of all words in COCA-Acad. Complete lists and detailed information at: www.academicwords.info.
Rank
771
772
773
774
775
776
777
778
779
780
781
782
783
Band
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
Word/lemma
obtain
potential
variety
talk
popular
buy
complete
moral
component
following
stock
eye
pass
PoS
v
j
n
v
j
v
v
j
n
j
n
n
v
COCA-All
26,380
34,024
36,462
248,986
45,524
109,080
35,373
28,851
23,762
28,582
57,330
183,865
94,585
COCA-Acad
17,489
17,472
17,471
17,437
17,433
17,425
17,363
17,288
17,228
17,205
17,200
17,179
17,160
Ratio
2.32
1.80
1.68
0.25
1.34
0.56
1.72
2.10
2.54
2.11
1.05
0.33
0.64
Disp
0.93
0.94
0.93
0.96
0.93
0.90
0.93
0.90
0.91
0.95
0.81
0.94
0.93
Range
8
9
9
9
9
8
9
8
8
9
5
9
9
Domain
Fin
Edu
Rel
Fin
The row color is a function of the type of word:
1. “Core” academic (yellow): 3,000 words total, e.g. potential or component
2. Domain specific (gray): e.g. moral (Rel/Phil) or stock (Finance)
3. All other words (no color): e.g. talk, eye, pass
Columns
Rank
Band
word
PoS
COCA-All
COCA-Acad
ratio
dispersion
range
domains
Explanation
In the ~20,000 words of COCA-Academic (e.g. component is the 779th most frequent
word)
The words are divided into 500 word “bands”
The word; actually the lemma (e.g. [report] = {report, reported}, etc
Part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc)
Overall frequency in COCA (450 million words)
Frequency in COCA Academic (120 million words)
A ratio showing how much more frequent the word is in Academic than the rest of COCA
(per million words); e.g. 1.50 = 50% more frequent
How "evenly" the word is spread across COCA Academic (0-1). This is the Juilland "d"
measure.
In how many of the nine domains does the word occur with at least 20% of the expected
frequency (based on the size of that domain)
The domains in which the word has at least three times the expected frequency (based
on the size of that domain in COCA-Academic). In these cases, the word cannot be part of
the “core” academic list