The list was developed by analysing a corpus or body of academic written texts to find out which words occurred across a range of 28 subject areas (such as Biology, History, Marketing, and International Law) in four academic disciplines (Arts, Commerce, Law, and Science). These words were selected because of their range and frequency of occurrence. The Academic Word List covers roughly 10% of written academic text.
Below you can find the entries that are part of the Academic Word List organised into sublists. Sublist 1 contains the most common words in the AWL. Sublist 2 contains the next most common words, and so on.
Within the entries in the online version of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, you will find words from the Academic Word List are labelled with

.
You can find out more by visiting the
Academic Word List site.