ESL Academic Word List

About

This is a list of academic words for students learning English as a Second or Foreign Language. It includes 570 word families that often appear in academic texts. The words at the beginning of the list are used most often in academic writing, and the words at the end are used less often.

The best way to improve vocabulary is to understand new words in their natural settings in stories, articles, and conversations. Sometimes, however, we need more help. Wordnik is a new way to get that help.

Wordnik has several dictionary choices. For English learners, I believe that the WordNet dictionary is the best. In addition to definitions, here on Wordnik you will find (1) many examples of how words are used, including from Twitter; (2) pictures from Flickr that have been tagged (tags are words that describe) with the word you are looking at; some of the pictures are very helpful; and (3) recorded pronunciations of each word.

The Academic Word List (AWL) was developed by Averil Coxhead at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.