The GSL: The 2000 Most useful words in the English language.
The General Service List (GSL) (West. 1953) is a set of 2,000 words selected to be of the
greatest "general service" to learners of English. They are not the most common 2,000
words, though frequency was one of the factors taken into account in making the
selection. Each of the 2,000 words is a headword representing a word family that is only
loosely defined in West. Frequency numbers are given, derived from Thorndike and
Lorge (1944). Frequencydata is also given for the various meanings of words. This list
has had a wide influence for many years, serving as the basis for graded readers as well
as other material. Texts based on the GSL are still on sale, but the list itself is out of print.
A fuller discussion of the GSL, and word lists in general, can be found in Nation (1990,
pp 21-24) and Carter and McCarthy (1988, Ch. 1)
The list given here was created by John Bauman and Brent Culligan in early 1995. We
wanted a version of the GSL ranked in frequency order. In order to address the above
problems, we adapted two authorities. To determine which words to include as forms
related to a headword, we used the standard set out in Bauer and Nation (1995). This
article uses various criteria to group derived forms into word families. Related words are
ranked into levels. Words related by levels 1 to 4 are grouped under a headword on this
list, and the frequency numbers are added. To determine the frequency of a words, we
used the frequency numbers from the Brown Corpus (Frances and Kucera, 1982). Using
these criteria, the GSL ends up as 2284 words.
On the "next page" is the list of 2,284 words. It is in frequency order, with one word per
line. Each line contains the following: rank number-space-frequency number-space-word
Note:
The frequency number represents the number of occurrences of that word and its
related forms in the 1,000,000 words of the Brown corpus.
1 69975 the
2 39175 be
3 36432 of
4 28872 and
5 26800 a
6 26190 to
7 21338 in
8 20033 he
9 12458 have
10 11247 it
11 10790 that
12 9495 for
13 8555 they
14 8516 I
15 7289 with
16 7254 as
17 6976 not
18 6742 on
19 6164 she
20 5377 at
21 5307 by

MERCI BCP

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