Vocabulary Frequency is an effective way for language students to learn vocabulary. When you understand how vocabulary frequency works, you will discover which vocabulary items to completely master, which items to focus on and which ones to grasp the meaning of for the task at hand.
How is it Organized?
Vocabulary is organized according to how frequently it is used by native speakers. Can you guess what word is most frequently used by native English speakers? It will be a grammatical item and will be found in almost every sentence. The word is ‘the’.
In fact, the top 50 words are mostly grammatical. It’s not until we get to number 28 that we actually have a word with meaning (say). Another interesting and useful thing to know is that the top 50 words are all of Old English origin. The first word that has a different origin, Latin, is ‘use’ at number 83.
You can look at a list of the most common English words with their rankings here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English: Vocabulary FrequencyVocabulary frequency is organized into blocks of 1000 words. The first 1000 words are labelled A1. The following blocks of 1000 words are labelled A2 (1001-2000), B1 (2001-3000), B2 (3001-4000), C1 (4001-5000 and Over(over 5001).
What does that mean for language learners? When you know the vocabulary frequency of a word, you can decide how important it is for you at your current level.
Levels Explained
Below, I have constructed a table with some of the features of each category, A1-Over. I will try to explain a few things briefly.. The percentages are very rough estimates. The purpose is to give you an idea of the trends.
In the row labelled frequency, you can see the frequency range.
In the row labelled grammatical, you can see the approximate percentage of words that are grammatical (pronouns, prepositions, determiners, etc.) vs. words with meaning. I have not included a row labelled lexical because it is simply the inverse of the grammatical usage. For example, under the A1 column, you can see that approximately 80% of the words are grammatical. It stands to reason that the lexical words comprise 20% of that group.
In the row labelled lexical style, I have tried to briefly describe the topics you would most likely be discussing when using that level of vocabulary. For example, if you are discussing an everyday topic such as cleaning your house, you would rely on A1 and A2 words, whereas if you were discussing the history of ancient Egypt, you would need highly specialized words which would likely be in the C1 column or higher.
Finally, in the row labelled Old English, you will see the approximate percentage of words that have an Old English origin. For obvious reasons I did not include a row with borrowed word percentages. The majority of borrowed words in the English language originate from French and Latin.
| A1 | A2 | B1 | B2 | C1 | Over | |
| frequency | 1-1000 | 1001-2000 | 2001-3000 | 3001-4000 | 4001-5000 | 5001 and over |
| Grammatical | 80% | 65% | 50% | 35% | 25% | 15% |
| Lexical style | mostly concete, everyday topics | mix of concrete and abstract | mix of concrete and abstract | mostly abstract and topic-specific | abstract, literary, academic and technical | highly abstract, literary, academic and technical |
| Old English | 70% | 60% | 50% | 40% | 30% | 20% |
How Can Learners Use this Information?
Now that we have looked closely at what you will find in the various levels of vocabulary frequency, let’s discuss how you can use it.
As we now know, A1 and A2 words contain all the essential grammar words in English. You probably already know most of these words, which makes learning the rest of the vocabulary in those two levels a much easier task.
Some students ask me why they should bother learning A1 and A2 words. After all, everyone knows words like table, dog and take.
Wait a Minute!
These are the most important words in the language! We need these words 80% of the time. Each of the A1 and A2 lexical words has more than one meaning (which usually means you don’t know them all), they are necessary for the metaphors we use daily, they form phrasal verbs and they are core elements in everyday expressions. If you could only learn 2000 words, these would be the ones that you need.
Learn them well. Go back and read the entire dictionary entry. I guarantee that you will learn something new about every single lexical word at the A1 and A2 levels.
Another thing to notice about these words is their origins. This is where you will find the majority of Old English words.
What’s so special about that, you ask? Well, all the unique English features in pronunciation will be found in these words (ex., th- these, thumb, think, sk, sky, skirt, skull, str- street, straight, strong, etc.). You will also encounter all those weird English spellings at the A1 and A2 level (ex., through, knife, ghost, etc). In short, the A1 and A2 vocabulary frequency levels are where you’ll find all things English as far as the language goes.
Teacher’s Recommendations
My recommendation for you as a language learner is to consider the vocabulary frequency of any new word you encounter.
If it is B1 or lower, master it. Read everything there is to read about it in the dictionary. Use it throughout the day until it’s completely part of your everyday English vocabulary.
If the new word is B2 or higher, consider why you have encountered it. Is it only necessary for the task you are doing at the moment? Is it topic-specific? Or can you imagine a situation where you might need it?
This website relies heavily on vocabulary frequency. I will refer to it often in posts and other exercises. I use it to help you learn the vocabulary for the stories and exercises I create for you. I have written this post because if you visit this website again, you can be sure to come across vocabulary frequency time and time again.
