The New General Service List ( NGSL ) is a list of 2,809 words ( lemmas ) claimed to be a list of words that second language learners of the English language are most likely to meet in their daily lives. It was published by Dr. Charles Browne, Dr. Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips in March 2013 and updated in 2016 and 2023.
9-503: The words in the NGSL represent the most important high frequency words of the English language for second language learners of English and is a major update of Michael West's 1953 GSL . Although there are more than 600,000 words in the English language, the 2,800 words in the NGSL give more than 92% coverage for learners when trying to read most general texts of English. The main goals of
18-403: Is a list of roughly 2,000 words published by Michael West in 1953. The words were selected to represent the most frequent words of English and were taken from a corpus of written English. The target audience was English language learners and ESL teachers. To maximize the utility of the list, some frequent words that overlapped broadly in meaning with words already on the list were omitted. In
27-663: Is not a list based solely on frequency, but includes groups of words on a semantic basis. Various versions float around the Internet, and attempts have been made to improve it. There are two major updates of the GSL: Some ESL dictionaries use the General Service List as their controlled defining vocabulary . In the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English , each definition is written using
36-454: The GSL were good selections based on their high frequency and wide range, he was of the opinion that the words beyond the first 1,000 of the GSL could not be considered general service words because the range and frequency of these words were too low to be included in the list. Recent research by Billuroğlu and Neufeld (2005) confirmed that the General Service List was in need of minor revision, but
45-411: The NGSL project were to (1) modernize and greatly increase the size of the corpus used by, and to (2) create a list of words that provided a higher degree of coverage with fewer words than, the original GSL. The 273-million-word subsection of the more than two-billion-word Cambridge English Corpus is about 100 times larger than the 2.5 million word corpus developed in the 1930s for the original GSL, and
54-419: The approximately 2,800 words in the NGSL gives about 6% more coverage than the GSL (90% vs 84%) when both lists are lemmatized . Copies of the NGSL in various forms (by headword, lemmatized, with definitions), published articles about the list and links to analytical tools and materials that use the NGSL are all available from the NGSL website. General Service List The General Service List ( GSL )
63-437: The headwords in the list still provide approximately 80% text coverage in written English. The research showed that the GSL contains a small number of archaic terms, such as shilling , while excluding words that have gained currency since the first half of the twentieth century, such as plastic , television , battery , okay , victim , and drug . The GSL evolved over several decades before West's publication in 1953. The GSL
72-423: The original publication the relative frequencies of various senses of the words were also included. The list is important because a person who knows all the words on the list and their related families would understand approximately 90–95 per cent of colloquial speech and 80–85 per cent of common written texts. The list consists only of headwords , which means that the word "be" is high on the list, but assumes that
81-412: The person is fluent in all forms of the word, e.g. am, is, are, was, were, being, and been. Researchers have expressed doubts about the adequacy of the GSL because of its age and the relatively low coverage provided by the words not in the first 1,000 words of the list. Engels was, in particular, critical of the limited vocabulary chosen by West (1953), and while he concurred that the first 1,000 words of
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