Beyond BNC-14k Lists
The words in these lists are < one-per-million items from the BNC corpus, selected according to two constraints:
- the number of BNC sub-corpora (from 100) they can be found in (their 'range'), and
- their not being found in Nation's 14k lists
|
GROUP 1 Words <1 per million and present in 6 to 9 sub-corpora Tending to rarity and/or specialization. Large numbers of words at each range, mainly because too rare and offering too little coverage to appear in Nation's 14 lists. range=06 27k (± 2,700 words) range=07 20k (± 2,000 words) range=08 16k (± 1,600 words) range=09 13k (± 1,300 words) |
GROUP 2 Words <1 per million, present in 10 to 16 sub-corpora. Very colourful and useful words, just outside Nation's selection, words known to any educated English speaker yet possibly not for productive use. range=10 10k (± 1,000 words) range=11 09k (± 900 words) range=12 08k (± 800 words) range=13 07k (± 700 words) range=14 06k (± 600 words) range=15 06k (± 500 words) range=16 05k (± 450 words) |
GROUP 3 Words <1 per million, present in 17 to 40 sub-corpora These words are tending toward medium, not low, frequency. Small lists - Nation has already cleaned out this area. range=17-18 08k (± 750 words) range=19-20 06k (± 600 words) range=21-23 07k (± 650 words) range=24-26 05k (± 450 words) range=27-30 04k (± 400 words) range=31-5 02k (± 150 words) range=36-40 01k (< 100 words) |
| ± 7600 words | ± 5000 words | ± 3000 words |
These 18 word lists, comprising ± 15,600 items, are (arguably) an empirically based definition of the outer fringe of the general or non-specialist lexicon of English (although no doubt some specialist items will be found in the leftmost set of lists above).
Note: these lists are not lemmatized or organized into family units; different members of the same family may appear in several lists, or in Nation's 14 lists.
This work was performed using Post-14 cruncher (see sidebar menu) and Vocabprofile BNC (see Related Links).