Academic Vocabulary Checker
Paste your writing to highlight every word from the New Academic Word List (NAWL) — about 960 words that recur across academic texts beyond core everyday English — and see your coverage as a share of all running words, with each list word you used. Free, no sign-up, and nothing leaves your browser.
Runs entirely in your browser — your text is never uploaded.
Paste or type some text to see which of its words are on the New Academic Word List.
Academic words come from the New Academic Word List 1.2 (Browne, Culligan & Phillips, 2013; CC BY-SA 4.0), adapted to 951 entries — details below.
How to Use the Academic Vocabulary Checker
- Paste your text. An abstract, a paragraph or a full paper. Words are matched as you type.
- Read the coverage. It is the share of your running words that are on the NAWL. Hyphenated words are split, as corpus tools split them, so semi-structured counts as semi plus structured.
- Scan the highlights and the table. Each highlighted word shows the list entry it counts under; the table gives every entry you used, how often, and in which forms.
- Compare rather than score. Run two drafts, or your text and a published article in your field, and compare the figures.
What the New Academic Word List Measures
Charles Browne, Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips built the NAWL in 2013 from a 288-million-word corpus of academic journals, textbooks, student essays and spoken academic English. It is designed to sit on top of their New General Service List (NGSL) of about 2,800 core English words: together, the two lists cover about 92% of the words in that corpus. The NAWL updates Averil Coxhead's 2000 Academic Word List, which was built on top of an older general list.
That design explains what you will and will not see highlighted. Academic words that are also everyday English — research, data, analysis, theory, evidence — belong to the general list, not the academic one, so they are not counted. What the NAWL picks out is the layer above: empirical, paradigm, longitudinal, variability. It also includes some concrete words that are simply frequent in textbooks, such as enzyme and vegetation, because the list was made by frequency across academic texts, not by formality.
Reading Your Coverage
In the corpus the list was built from, NAWL words made up roughly 6% of all words, against about 86% for the general list. A dense research abstract can sit well above that and a personal reflection well below it, and both can be good writing. The Try an example paragraph — a methods summary from a social-science study — reaches 16.7%: 14 of its 84 running words are on the list, from longitudinal to variability.
- Low coverage is not a fault. Plain, exact words are a virtue in academic writing. Coverage describes register, not quality.
- High coverage is not a goal. Swapping everyday words for list words to raise the number produces stiff, vague prose. Use a list word when it is the precise one.
- Compare like with like. Your discussion section against a published discussion section in the same field is a fair comparison; an essay against a lab report is not.
- Learn from the gaps. For learners of English, the list doubles as a study guide: entries you never use may be words worth learning.
Source and Licence
Word list: the New Academic Word List 1.2 by Charles Browne, Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. CitationEasy uses an adapted version: accented spellings are folded into plain ones (élite → elite), and eight informal words the list takes from its spoken data — incredible, incredibly, nasty, ridiculous, super, tech, terribly and tricky — are left out, which leaves 951 entries. The entry the original heads founds is shown as found, and bare found, almost always the past tense of find, is not counted. The adapted list is shared under the same licence.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is the New Academic Word List?
- The New Academic Word List (NAWL) is a list of about 960 words that occur frequently across academic texts but are not among the 2,800 or so core words of general English. Charles Browne, Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips published it in 2013 as an update of Coxhead's Academic Word List, and it is freely available under a Creative Commons licence.
- How is the NAWL different from Coxhead's Academic Word List?
- Coxhead's Academic Word List (2000) has 570 word families in ten sublists and was built on top of West's 1953 General Service List. The NAWL is built on top of the New General Service List, counts words as headwords with their inflections rather than as whole families, and is a single list with no sublists. Because the general lists differ, some words — research and analysis, for example — are on Coxhead's list but not on the NAWL.
- What is a good academic vocabulary coverage?
- There is no target. In the corpus the list was built from, NAWL words were roughly 6% of all words, but genre matters more than any benchmark: a dense methods section will score higher than a reflective essay. Compare your text with published writing of the same kind rather than with a number.
- Why isn't the word research highlighted?
- Because the NAWL leaves out words that are also core general English, and research, data, analysis and theory sit on its companion general list. The checker reports only the academic layer above everyday vocabulary.
- Does it recognize different forms of a word?
- Yes — the forms the list itself records: inflections and British and American spellings, such as randomize, randomise, randomized and randomizing. Words formed with a different suffix are separate entries on the NAWL — classify and classification are two — and are counted the same way.
- Is my text stored or sent anywhere?
- No. The word list ships with the page and the matching runs in your browser, so your text never leaves your device.