Academic Word List (AWL): What It Is and How to Learn It

The Academic Word List (AWL) is a set of 570 word families that turn up again and again in academic writing across subjects, but are not among the most common 2,000 words of everyday English. It was compiled by Averil Coxhead at Victoria University of Wellington and published in 2000. Words like analyse, concept, significant, establish and interpret are on it. If you are studying, or will be studying, in English, or writing reports at work, the AWL is one of the highest-value word sets you can learn.

The quickest way to learn it is one sublist at a time, as word families, with the collocations each word usually takes, practiced through short recall games rather than lists.

AWL facts at a glance

The selection criteria were about range as well as frequency. A word did not qualify just by being common in one subject; it had to appear across many subject areas. That is why the list is full of general-purpose academic words, such as verbs for reporting evidence and abstract nouns, rather than specialist terms like photosynthesis or tort.

What a word family means here

Each AWL entry is a headword plus related forms built with common prefixes and suffixes. The headword analyse, for example, covers forms such as analysis, analyst, analytic, analytical, analytically and analysed. Learning the family together pays off because academic writing constantly shifts between parts of speech:

• "We analysed the data." (verb)
• "The analysis showed..." (noun)
• "An analytical approach..." (adjective)

Many learners know the noun form of an AWL word but cannot produce the verb, or vice versa. Practicing the whole family closes that gap.

Sample words from sublist 1

Sublist 1 holds the most frequent families, so it is the natural place to start. Here are ten of them with the forms and collocations you are most likely to need:

Other sublist 1 headwords include approach, area, assume, authority, available, benefit, consist, context, contract, create, data, define, derive, distribute, economy, environment, estimate, evident, function, identify, income, individual, involve, issue, legal, major, method, occur, percent, period, policy, principle, proceed, process, require, research, respond, role, section, sector, similar, specific, structure and theory.

Who should learn the AWL

• Students preparing for university in English. Lectures, textbooks and journal articles lean heavily on these words.
• IELTS and TOEFL candidates. Reading passages and academic writing tasks are full of AWL vocabulary, and using it accurately in your own writing tends to make it sound more academic. See the topic pages on IELTS vocabulary and academic vocabulary.
• Native speakers heading into higher education. Many of these words are known receptively but used shakily in essays.
• Professionals who write proposals, reports and policies, where words like allocate, criteria, framework and implement are everyday tools.

Limitations worth knowing

The AWL is a strong starting point, not the whole story.

• It is general, not subject-specific. A biology student still needs biology terms; a law student needs legal ones.
• It assumes the 2,000 most common words are known. Learners below roughly intermediate level will get more from high-frequency general vocabulary first.
• The corpus is from the 1990s and before, and newer lists have been built from larger collections. Gardner and Davies's Academic Vocabulary List (2014), for instance, uses a different method and a newer corpus. Much of the AWL reappears in these later lists, so time spent on it is not wasted.
• Frequency is not meaning. Some AWL words have several senses (issue as a problem, a publication, or the act of giving out), and you need to learn the academic sense.

Games that work for AWL words

Academic words can feel dry, which is exactly why short game formats help. These work with a partner, a class or on your own. More formats are in the vocabulary games collection, and why word games build vocabulary explains which game mechanics do the learning.

Family builder

Write a headword in the middle of a page (define). Give yourself 60 seconds to write every family member you can: definition, definitive, definitely, undefined, redefine, well-defined. Check against a dictionary. Score one point per correct form, two for a form you had not studied.

Collocation match

Make two columns of cards: AWL verbs (conduct, draw, raise, reach) and nouns (research, a conclusion, concerns, a consensus). Shuffle and match. Then write a sentence for each pair. The point is to learn which words travel together: you conduct research, draw a conclusion, raise concerns and reach a consensus.

Register swap

Take an informal sentence and rewrite it using AWL words. This is the most useful game for essay writing.

Sublist sprint

Set a timer for three minutes. Go through the current sublist and, for each headword, say a collocation out loud. Anything you cannot do goes into tomorrow's review pile.

Paragraph hunt

Take a page from a textbook or journal article in your field. Highlight every word you think is from the AWL, then check. You will quickly see how much of academic prose these families cover, and you will meet each word in a real sentence.

A ten-week AWL plan

The review part matters as much as the new words. Our spaced repetition guide shows how to schedule it, and fill-in-the-blank practice (as described in active recall vs passive review) is a natural fit for academic words, because they depend so much on the surrounding sentence.

Using AWL words at school and work

Knowing an academic word and using it well are different skills. Three habits help:

• Use the collocation, not just the word. "Make an analysis" sounds off; "carry out an analysis" or "conduct an analysis" sounds natural. Check a learner's dictionary for typical partners.
• Do not overload. A sentence stuffed with significant, framework, paradigm and facilitate is hard to read. One or two precise academic words per sentence is usually plenty.
• Match the register. AWL words suit essays, reports and formal emails. In a chat message, "look into" is better than "investigate".

A quick before-and-after from a work email:

Before: "We checked the new supplier and the numbers look OK, but there are some things we need to think about before we go ahead."

After: "We have assessed the new supplier and the figures appear reasonable, but several factors require consideration before we proceed."

Both are correct; the second suits a formal report. Choose based on your reader.

Going further

Many AWL words are built from Latin roots (struct in structure, spec in specific, duct in conduct). Learning a few roots makes the families easier to remember, as explained in the practical map of English roots and affixes. If you are moving from intermediate to upper-intermediate English, the AWL fits naturally with the steps in our guide to the B1 to B2 vocabulary jump. For a complete approach to growing your word knowledge beyond academic lists, see our complete vocabulary-building guide.