The core English vocabulary

Questions about this list

What is the core english collection?

The words carrying the most work in everyday English — top commonness band, ordered by how many senses each has been stretched to cover. It holds 1,635 entries drawn from the 147,478 in AltF Lexicon.

How was this list of core english put together?

Membership is computed from data the entry already carries, applied to every entry in the corpus, so the list regenerates correctly whenever the corpus changes.

What is the most common of the core english?

a — it sits in the top commonness band of the words stored for this list. The list is ordered by commonness, so the words most readers already half know come first and the specialist tail comes last.

What is the longest word in this collection?

congratulations, at 15 letters. The average across the list is 1.7 syllables per word.

Does this page show every one of the 1,635 words?

No. 1,635 entries match the rule; the page carries the first 600 of them, ranked by commonness. The remainder are all still in the dictionary and reachable by search or by browsing A–Z.

• Concrete nouns57,550Nouns for things with physical existence — objects, substances, artifacts, bodies, plants and animals.
• Every adjective20,994The complete adjective vocabulary, ordered by commonness.
• Abstract nouns13,828Nouns for states, qualities and ideas rather than things you can point at — WordNet's attribute, state and cognition files combined.
• Advanced vocabulary13,140Uncommon words of three syllables or more that still carry a usage example — the band that competitive exams and serious writing draw on. Selected by frequency band, not copied from any exam's official list.
• Adjectives worth knowing10,120Descriptive adjectives beyond the everyday band, each with at least one recorded example of use.
• Every verb8,702The complete verb vocabulary of the corpus, ordered by commonness.
• Words with clear opposites6,621Entries where WordNet records a direct antonym — the pairs worth learning together.
• Everyday words4,359Common vocabulary a step beyond the core — the words that make writing sound natural rather than basic.
• Verbs worth knowing3,878Uncommon verbs with a usage example attached — the single fastest way to stop writing 'do', 'get' and 'make' three times a paragraph.