:New General Service List

{{Short description|List of ca. 2800 words in English}}

The New General Service List (NGSL) is a list of 2,809 words (lemmas){{Cite web|date=2018-05-29|title=New General Service List: Core Vocabulary For EFL Students & Teachers|url=https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2018/05/29/general-service-list/|access-date=2021-10-18|website=World of Better Learning {{!}} Cambridge University Press|language=en-US}} 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.

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.{{cite web|url=https://www.newgeneralservicelist.com/|title=New General Service List Project|access-date=10 May 2022}}

Although there are more than 600,000 words in the English language,{{cite web|title=Oxford English Dictionary|url=http://www.oed.com}} 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 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{{cite web|title=Cambridge English Corpus|url=http://www.cambridge.org/gb/elt/catalogue/subject/custom/item3646595/Cambridge-English-Corpus-Written-English/?site_locale=en_GB}} is about 100 times larger than the 2.5 million word corpus developed in the 1930s for the original GSL, and the approximately 2,800 words in the NGSL gives about 6% more coverage than the GSL (90% vs 84%) when both lists are lemmatized.{{cite journal|last=Browne|first=Charles|date=July 2013|title=The New General Service List: Celebrating 60 years of Vocabulary Learning|url=https://jalt-publications.org/files/pdf-article/37.4tlt_featureds.pdf|journal=The Language Teacher|series=4|volume=37|pages=13–16}}

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.

See also

References

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Further reading

  • {{Cite journal|last=Brezina|first=Vaclav|last2=Gablasova|first2=Dana|date=February 2015|title=Is There a Core General Vocabulary? Introducing the New General Service List|url=https://academic.oup.com/applij/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/applin/amt018|journal=Applied Linguistics|language=en|volume=36|issue=1|pages=1–22|doi=10.1093/applin/amt018|issn=1477-450X|url-access=subscription}}