New General Service List 1.2

The NGSL 1.2 is a 2809-word list of the most important words of general English and daily life for second language learners. Though this is less than 10% of the vocabulary known by native speaker college graduates, it gives an average of 92% coverage of most texts of general English and even higher coverage in other situations (93% coverage for Harry Potter, 94% coverage for TOEIC exams, and 95% coverage for many TV shows such as Friends).

The New General Service List (NGSL)

Though the NGSL was designed primarily to predict the words second language learners will encounter in their daily life, multiple research studies are showing that the NGSL also provides excellent coverage on a number of high stakes exams. MacDonald (2019) found that the NGSL provided more than 95% coverage for the national Center Exam for entrance into Japanese universities, Nakayama (2022) found the NGSL gave between 92.8 and 95.8% coverage for the 3 top selling MEXT-approved high school textbooks and Iwamoto and Kramer (2020) found that just the first 1000 words of the NGSL provides 98.11% coverage for Japanese high school entrance exams. Our own internal research (Browne and Culligan 2021) shows that the NGSL is an excellent first step for TOEIC test preparation, covering 94% of the latest version of the TOEIC exam.

The NGSL 1.2 is the latest version of the NGSL, released in April of 2023. The list is only 8 words longer than the NGSL 1.01 but incorporates a number of changes and suggestions from linguists and vocabulary specialists with long experience using the original NGSL. All of our other Special Purpose (SP) wordlists have now also been updated to 1.2 versions so they can be used seamlessly with the NGSL 1.2. These include our lists for TOEIC English (TSL 1.2), Business English (BSL 1.2), Academic English (NAWL 1.2) and Fitness English (FEL 1.2). A summary of the changes from 1.01 to 1.2 can be seen in the chart below:

NOTE: With regard to our free NGSL online tools, please note that some tools will be available only with the older NGSL 1.10 version (Quizlet and the NGSL Builder flashcard app) while other tools will be available only with the new NGSL 1.2 version (Wordle, Crossword Puzzles, Word Search, Online Graded Text Editor, VocabProfile and the Word-Learner app).

NGSL 1.2 Downloadable Word Lists:

(Please note that NGSL frequency data is included only in “NGSL 1.2 with basic statistics”)

  1. NGSL 1.2 with basic statistics (includes frequency rankings)

  2. NGSL 1.2 alphabetized with a brief explanation of corpus

  3. NGSL 1.2 alphabetized and lemmatized for teaching

  4. NGSL 1.2 alphabetized and lemmatized for research

  5. NGSL 1.2 list with definitions in easy English

ADDITIONAL FILES:

  1. NGSL 1.2 plus stats and frequencies to 31k for research purposes

  2. NGSL SUPPLEMENTARY WORDS (these 52 words are part of the NGSL but do not have frequency rankings and are thus not included in the first 5 files above. They include days of the week, months of the year and numerical words)

NGSL 1.2 Teaching, Learning & Content Development Tools:

  1. NGSL 1.2 Learning Dictionary functions include:

    • Video Concordance for Each Word

    • Wordle

    • Word Search

    • Crossword Puzzles

    • Links to 6 Dictionaries for Each Word

    • Links to Multiple Pronunciations for Each Word

  2. NGSL 1.2 on NGSL Profiler (text analysis, text simplification & AI text generation tools)

  3. NGSL 1.2 on VocabProfile

  4. NGSL 1.2 on AntWord Profiler

  5. NGSL 1.2 Word-Learner app with gamification & LMS

NOTE: The OGTE text analysis tool does not function properly and is no longer being updated so please use the free NGSL Profiler Tool created by Dr. Browne instead.

New General Service List 1.01

The NGSL 1.01 is the archive version of the NGSL, which was widely used from 2016 through 2023. Many tools, apps and textbooks still use the NGSL 1.01 so these resources will continue to be made available via the links below.

NGSL 1.01 Teaching, Learning & Content Development Tools:

  1. NGSL 1.01 Quizlet flashcards

  2. NGSL 1.01 Memrise flaschards

  3. NGSL 1.01 free flashcard app with spaced repetition

CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE

  • New General Service List by Browne, C., Culligan, B., and Phillips, J. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

  • Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.charlie-browne.com