The Oxford 3000 wordlist

What is the Oxford 3000 - and who compiled it?

'The Oxford 3000 is a compiled list of 3,000 keywords in English - the most important and useful words which students need to learn.'

How were the words selected?

'There are three criteria:

1. The words which occur most frequently in the British National Corpus and the Oxford Corpus Collection. But frequency was not enough for a word to qualify as a keyword: it may be that the word is used very frequently, but .ly in narrowly defined areas, such as newspapers or scientific articles.
2. To avoid including these restricted words, Oxford 3000 keywords must be frequent across a range of different types of text. In other words, keywords are both frequent and used in a variety of contexts.
3. In addition, the list includes some very important words which are not amongst the most frequent words, even though they are very familiar to most users of English. These include, for example, words for parts of teh body, words used in travel, and words which are useful for explaining what you mean when you do not know the exact word for something. These words were identified by consulting a panel of over seventy experts in the fields of teaching and language study.'

The Oxford 3000 words are used as the defining vocabulary for the OALD, making the explanations much easier for students to understand.
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