The Academic Word List

When writing your thesis or report it can be very hard to wield the correct language. You want your academic writing to be professional and of high quality. To help you accomplishing this goal Averil Coxhead of Victoria University of Wellington developed the Academic Word List (AWL). This list contains 570 word families that appear with great frequency in a broad range of academic texts. The list does not include words that are in the most frequent 2000 words of English, this many of the words are specific to academic contexts. The Academic Word List is a useful tool for academic writing.

Insight by examples

To give you some indication how the Academic Word list is build up, this section provides you with examples. The list of 570 word families is split into 10 sublists. Below you find how three word families are shown in the Academic Word List by Averil Coxhead.

“involve
      involved
      involvement
      involves
      involving
      uninvolved
issue
      issued
      issues
      issuing
labour
      labor
      labored
      labors
      laboured
      labouring
      labours” 

The small list above only gives an example of how the list is constructed. To expand your range of useful about academic words go to the website of Victoria University of Wellington!