General Service Lists: A Brief History
The General Service List (GSL), published by Michael West in 1953, holds an important place in the history of English language learning and teaching. Created during a time when pedagogically sound language learning materials were scarce and English was gaining prominence as a global language, the GSL aimed to provide second language learners with a short list of core general English vocabulary words they were most likely to encounter in their daily lives.
Developed over a period of 17 years between 1936 and 1953, the GSL involved the work of some of the most prominent linguists of that era including Harold Palmer, Laurence Faucett, Edward Thorndike and Itsu Maki to name a few. The work was painstakingly done in a pre-computer era and based on a 2.5 million word hand-collected, hand-counted corpus of written English. The most widely used version of the GSL comprises 2284 words and provides learners with about 80% coverage for most written passages of general English.
One unique feature of the GSL is that it comprises both quantitative and qualitative insights. Frequency within the corpus represented the quantitative side while the input and experience of experts such as West, Faucett and Palmer represented the qualitative side. The team had many conferences (some sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation), long discussions and debates about which words should be in and out of the list, and the drawing on the left side of the cover photo for this blog post was drawn by Michael West’s wife, depicting one of the many spirited discussions they had on the final makeup of their wordlist.
I was first introduced to the GSL as an MEd student while studying under Paul Nation, one of the greatest vocabulary experts of the modern era. I found the idea of a short list of core vocabulary words designed to meet the needs of second language learners so compelling that I not only signed on to continue to do my doctoral studies under him but also immediately began to systematically teach these words to my Japanese college students. Although I found the first 1000 words of the GSL to be very useful for students, I began to come across a number of words in the second 1000 words of the GSL that seemed dated. For example, agricultural words like “plow, “mill” or “spade”, sea travel words like “sailor”, “vessel” or “oar” and other words like “telegraph”, “gaiety” and “coal”, words which might have been important in the daily lives of 2nd language learners 100 years ago, but clearly were not as important in the daily lives of 21st century students. I soon realized that although the premise of the GSL word list was spot on, the English language evolves and changes over time and that the GSL was in need of modernization.
In 2013, on the 60th anniversary of Michael West’s publication of the GSL, my colleagues and I released a major update of the GSL known as the New General Service List or NGSL. Derived from a carefully selected 273 million-word subsection of the 2-billion-word Cambridge English Corpus (CEC) and following many of the same steps that West and his colleagues did, we did our best to combine the strong, objective scientific principles of corpus and vocabulary list creation with the pedagogic insights of vocabulary experts to create a list of approximately 2,800 high-frequency words that 21st century second language learners would be likely to encounter in their daily lives.
Utilizing the power of computers and other electronic tools, we were able to address several areas of weakness in the original GSL including the need to modernize the makeup of the corpus, the need to greatly expand the size of the corpus (the NGSL corpus is about 100x bigger than the GSL, giving far more accurate frequency counts in the 2nd and 3rd 1000 word bands) , as well as the need to achieve substantially higher coverage figures for general English texts.
The results have been promising. The NGSL provides an average of 92% coverage for most modern texts of general English, and even higher in many other situations, providing for example, 94% coverage for Harry Potter, 94% for TOEIC exams, 95% for the Japanese national center exam and 95% for popular TV shows such as Friends. Like with the original GSL, my colleagues and I have had many spirited discussions and debates about the NGSL over the years, both at conferences where I have given more than 3 dozen plenary talks on the NGSL as well as privately among ourselves, doing our very best to help the list to evolve and improve over time. The 1.0 version of the NGSL was published in 2013, with the 1.01 update released in 2016 and the 1.2 update released in 2023.
One unique feature of the NGSL is that we have created a number of additional corpus-derived word lists, many of which work in a modular fashion with the NGSL. There are now 7 word lists, each of which offers the highest coverage in the world for that genre, including general English, academic English, business English, TOEIC English, children’s English and more. We have also worked hard to develop more than a dozen free online tools for teaching, learning and creating content using these wordlists. The scope and scale of this work is so large that we now refer to it as the New General Service List Project. All wordlists, tools, a list of NGSL research and more details of how the NGSL was developed can be accessed from our website (www.newgeneralservicelist.com).
The original GSL helped second language learners for more than 60 years. It is our sincere hope that the NGSL will be able to do so for at least another 60!
NOTE: for a fascinating and far more detailed explanation of the development of the original GSL, please see Leah Gilner’s 2011 paper in Reading in a Foreign Language titled “A primer on the General Service List”.