Vocabulary Profiler
Paste any English text and see its vocabulary profile: what percentage of its words come from the first thousand, the second thousand and the rest of the New General Service List, how many are academic words, and which words fall outside both lists. Runs entirely in your browser — free, no sign-up.
Runs entirely in your browser — your text is never uploaded. The word lists download once per visit.
Paste or type some English text to see which frequency band each of its words belongs to.
Word lists: the New General Service List 1.2 and the New Academic Word List 1.2 by Browne, Culligan & Phillips, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 and adapted here (details below). Bands within the NGSL are cut at frequency ranks 1,000 and 2,000.
How to Use the Vocabulary Profiler
- Paste your text. An abstract, a reading passage, a chapter or a whole paper. The profile updates as you type, and the two word lists download once when you first paste.
- Read the coverage. The headline figures give the share of running words that belong to general English, to the academic list and to neither. The table breaks the general share into frequency bands.
- Check the off-list words. These are the words on neither list, most frequent first. In a research paper they are mostly technical terms; in a learner's essay they may be rare words or misspellings.
- Look at the highlighted text. Academic words are shaded violet and off-list words amber, in your own text, so you can see where the unfamiliar vocabulary sits.
The Two Word Lists
The profiler uses two companion lists by Charles Browne, Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips. The New General Service List (NGSL) holds 2,809 lemmas of everyday English, ranked by frequency, plus 52 supplementary words (days, months and numbers). The authors report that it covers about 92% of an average general English text. The New Academic Word List (NAWL) is built to sit on top of it: it holds the words that recur across academic writing but are not among the NGSL's. Together they covered about 92% of the 288-million-word academic corpus the NAWL was built from, with the NGSL accounting for about 86% of the words and the NAWL for about 6%.
A lemma is a headword with its inflected forms: study, studies, studied and studying are one entry. Matching uses the forms the lists themselves record, including British and American spellings. A word counts under the first list that holds it, general before academic. The general list is split into three bands by frequency rank: words 1–1,000, 1,001–2,000 and 2,001–2,809. That split is ours, a conventional way to read a frequency-ranked list, not a division the authors publish.
Reading a Profile: A Worked Example
The widget's example is a 72-word research abstract. It looks like this:
| Band | Running words | Coverage | Cumulative |
|---|---|---|---|
| NGSL words 1–1,000 | 55 | 76.4% | 76.4% |
| NGSL words 1,001–2,000 | 5 | 6.9% | 83.3% |
| NGSL words 2,001–2,809 | 3 | 4.2% | 87.5% |
| NGSL days, months and numbers | 1 | 1.4% | 88.9% |
| Academic words (NAWL) | 3 | 4.2% | 93.1% |
| Off-list words | 5 | 6.9% | 100% |
The three academic words are adolescent, longitudinal and variability. The five off-list words — actigraphy, bedtimes, chronotype, deprivation and socioeconomic — are almost all technical vocabulary of sleep research, which is typical: a specialist text leans on a handful of field-specific terms that no general list can contain. The cumulative column shows what a reader who knew only the NGSL (about 89%) or the NGSL plus the NAWL (about 93%) would recognize.
What Coverage Means for a Reader
Researchers who study reading ask how many of a text's words a reader must know to follow it. Laufer (1989) put the minimum at about 95% of running words, and Hu and Nation (2000) found that about 98% was needed for comfortable, unassisted reading. By that yardstick, a text at 93% is hard for a reader who knows only these lists, and the off-list words are the ones to teach, gloss or look up first.
Coverage is a measure of the text, not a verdict on the writing. A paper on a technical subject will always show a long off-list tail, and plain, common words are a virtue in most prose. Use the profile to compare drafts of your own work, to see whether a reading passage suits a class, or to find the terms a newcomer will need defined.
What the Profiler Cannot Tell You
- Meaning. It matches strings of letters to lists, so a word like bank counts the same whether it means a riverbank or a lender. The lists treat each lemma as one unit.
- Names and acronyms. Capitalized words in mid-sentence that no list holds are treated as names and left out by default. A name at the start of a sentence, or a lowercase technical term, cannot be told apart from an ordinary off-list word.
- Difficulty. Frequency is a good guide to how soon a learner meets a word, but it is not the same as difficulty. A rare word can be transparent from its parts, and a frequent one can be hard to use.
- Spoken informality. Contractions such as don't are read by their stem (do), and informal forms the NGSL includes, like gonna, are counted as listed.
Source and Licence
Word lists: the New General Service List 1.2 and the New Academic Word List 1.2 by Charles Browne, Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. CitationEasy uses adapted versions, shared under the same licence: the NGSL file orders the lemmas by the authors' frequency rank and joins their supplementary words, and the NAWL is the adaptation used by the Academic Vocabulary Checker, which describes its changes. To cite the list, the authors recommend: Browne, C., Culligan, B. (2013). The New General Service List. Retrieved from https://www.newgeneralservicelist.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is the New General Service List (NGSL)?
- The NGSL is a list of 2,809 high-frequency lemmas of general English, built by Browne, Culligan and Phillips from a large corpus of English. It is designed for learners of English, and the authors report that it covers about 92% of an average general text. Version 1.2 appeared in 2023.
- How is vocabulary coverage calculated?
- Coverage is the number of running words found in a list divided by the total number of counted running words. Repeats count each time, so a word used ten times contributes ten. A text with 100 running words, 92 of them on the list, has 92% coverage.
- What is the difference between the NGSL and the NAWL?
- The NGSL holds the core words of general English. The NAWL holds the words that are frequent across academic texts but sit outside that core, such as longitudinal and paradigm. Everyday academic words like research and data are on the NGSL, which is why a text can show modest academic coverage and still be dense with academic content.
- Why are my technical terms off-list?
- Neither list is a specialist vocabulary. The NGSL is general English and the NAWL covers terms common to all academic fields, so the terms of one discipline, like actigraphy or heteroscedasticity, fall outside both. A long off-list tail in a subject-specific text is normal.
- How much vocabulary coverage is enough to understand a text?
- Studies suggest that readers need to know about 95% of the running words to follow a text with some help and about 98% to read it comfortably without assistance. The figures come from research on second-language reading and vary with the text type and the reader, so treat them as rules of thumb.
- How does the tool treat names and numbers?
- Digits are ignored. Capitalized words in mid-sentence that are on neither list are treated as names or acronyms and left out of the count unless you untick the option, and the tool reports how many it left out.
- Is my text uploaded?
- No. The matching runs in your browser. The page downloads the NGSL file once per visit, after you first paste something, and loads the NAWL with it. Your text is never sent anywhere.