Essential English Vocabulary
Rene Seiler
Teachers know that there is much more vocabulary than they have time to cover in class. Curricular materials, state standards, and local guidelines include lists of words thought to be crucial to understanding a given subject area. Even as they teach these recommended words, teachers might also need to add vocabulary terms that are unfamiliar to students because of their level of language proficiency or background knowledge in that area. These vocabulary lists can be overwhelming, and it might be necessary for teachers to decide which words in those lists are the most-essential to explicitly teach. Before they do so, however, it might be helpful for teachers to understand the information outlined in the table below.
There is a shared vocabulary of instructional words (e.g., rate, process, analyze) that are not specific to any one content area. These words are often overlooked because no one teacher takes responsibility for teaching them. Teachers should be aware of these shared vocabulary words and make sure that students understand their meaning as they relate to a given content area.
What Can Teachers Do?Once teachers understand the common types of vocabulary found in academic lessons (e.g., uncommon words, instructional words, words with multiple meanings), they can be selective and teach a manageable number of them. They can be more efficient by teaching only those words that are unfamiliar to their students or that are inadequately defined in the materials. Teachers should choose words that are critical to understanding the main ideas and information of the unit or lesson. To do that, they can preview the content material and identify vocabulary words that are:
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This project began with a desire to identify the vocabulary words that were most important to support the success of beginning communicators participating in the Dynamic Learning Maps alternate assessments in English language arts and mathematics. Through the years, the list first led to the development of the DLM First 40 and eventually to the Universal Core vocabulary for Project Core. The resulting Dynamic Learning Maps (DLM) and Universal Core Vocabulary Sort is a list of words that have been determined to be highly useful for communicating in both social and academic contexts. The words are listed in rank order of utility based on a variety of factors that are fully explained in The Universal Core Vocabulary Technical Report.
One of the most important things when you learn a new language is knowing where to start. It can be really overwhelming trying to decide which resource is right for you. So do it on your own terms instead and use the essential vocabulary to learn in any language list in this article to get you started.
Many thanks are due to the individuals and groups who have generously provided translations of the DCC Core Vocabularies and agreed to share them on the site. Thanks also to developers Lara Frymark and Ryan Burke, whose work allows for the upload of new lists. If you would like to contribute another translation, please do! We want the lists to be as useful as possible to Latin and Greek students around the world.
1. L. Delatte, Et. Evrard, S. Govaerts and J. Denooz, Dictionnaire frquentiel et index inverse de la langue latine (Lige: Laboratoire d'Analyse Statistique des Langues Anciennes, 1981). The "LASLA" list is available in .pdf form here.
Definitions and quantities were adapted from various sources, including Lodge 1922, and the Oxford Latin Dictionary. The frequency rankings are derived from LASLA and do not take Diederich's counts into consideration.
1. A subset of the comprehensive Thesaurus Linguae Graecae database, frequency data kindly provided by Maria Pantelia of TLG. The subset included all texts in the database up to AD 200, for a total of 20.003 million words; of this total, the period AD 100-200 accounts for about half, 10.235 million. The point of the chronological limit of AD 200 was to minimize any possible distortions that would be caused by the large amount of later Christian and Byzantine Greek in the TLG, texts that are not typically read by most students of ancient Greek. I would like to express my warm thanks to Prof. Pantelia for providing this valuable data.
2. The corpus of Greek authors at Perseus under PhiloLogic, which at the time our list was developed (summer 2012) contained approximately 5 million words. This frequency data was kindly provided by Helma Dik of the University of Chicago. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Prof. Dik for providing this valuable data, and for her very helpful advice about the list and related matters.
For both lists many judgment calls had to be made about which words to include and how to list them. This work was carried out by Chris Francese in 2012-13, with valuable help from the following: Wilfred Major of Louisiana State University was of enormous help at an early stage of the development of the Greek list, especially in analyzing the TLG frequency data and spotting innumerable pitfalls in it. Eric Casey of Sweet Briar College proof read the Greek list at a later stage and is responsible for a great many improvements. Meghan Reedy and Marc Mastrangelo, both of Dickinson College, improved the Latin and the Greek lists by helping to decide which words to include and how to list them. Dickinson students Alice Ettling, James Martin, Meredith Wilson, and Lara Frymark edited and proof read the lists in the summer of 2012, creating the semantic groupings and part of speech lists. They also helped compare the TLG and PhiloLogic Greek data, and digitized the LASLA Latin frequency data. Lara Frymark and Dickinson student Qingyu Wang created the searchable database versions in Drupal in the summer 2013 with help from web developer Ryan Burke. Alex Lee, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, improved both lists with his careful proof reading. The Greek principal parts are based on the lists of Evan Hayes and Stephen Nimis in their edition of Lucian's True Story, though I also consulted the TLG itself to determine which principal parts were actually in common use (more details on this can be found here). I am most grateful for the contributions of all these individuals. The lists would have been of far lower quality without their help. I take full responsibility for all remaining errors and infelicities, and would be grateful to be notified of any you discover. More details about how the lists were created can be found below.
The main point of core vocabulary lists such as these is to help prioritize the learning of vocabulary. Assuming the goal is to read extant Greek and Latin texts, one should learn these words first. The lists can be used to distinguish which words in a given text are very common, and which are not, and students can be held responsible for only the most common ones, and gradually build to a mastery of the whole core.
We also use them in this project to determine which Latin and Greek words are NOT normally glossed in the running vocabulary lists that go with each section of the texts themselves. Words on these lists may well occur on the running lists also, if they are used in an unusual sense.
The texts in DCC are intended to be readable by people at an intermediate level of study: those who have completed the introductory textbook, and have had some, though not necessarily very much, reading experience thereafter. On the one hand it is wrong to assume that those who have worked through an introductory textbook have complete command of all the vocabulary in it. On the other hand, the running lists need to be kept to a manageable size to avoid glossing very common words in a way that would simply obscure the more difficult ones. So these lists are meant both for study, to help build a core vocabulary, and as a method of keeping the running lists in the DCC series from becoming too big.
A 50% list of vocabulary, that is, all the distinct lexical items that account for half of the available corpus, amounts to about 250 words in Latin, fewer than 100 words in Greek (in English the figure is about 100) (Major, 2008, pp. 1-2). This constitutes the very basic core vocabulary that must be thoroughly mastered before any comfortable reading can occur. But using only this very small list here would make the running lists quite unwieldy, and possibly less useful for intermediate students, who should already be familiar with many more words than these.
Diederich used a database of 202,158 words (194,378 without proper names) from more than 200 authors "from Ennius to Erasmus" (iii, 4) who appear in the Oxford Book of Latin Verse, Avery's Latin Prose Literature, and Beeson's Primer of Medieval Latin. His explicit goal was to provide readers with vocabulary going beyond the basic texts (like Vergil, Cicero, Caesar) that Lodge and others relied on. His final tabulation included the number of times a given word occurred in classical prose, poetry, and medieval Latin, and all three together. A full list of the authors and works in his sample can be found here.
Lists based on the Word Study Tool at Perseus were found to be distinctly inferior to these two, despite the much larger sample available (10.5 million words as of 2012). The Word Study Tool is incapable of distinguishing between homographs, of which there are many in Latin. Occurrences of genibus, for example, are automatically assigned, half to genus and half to genu, which inappropriately makes the word for "knee" rank extremely high. This problem is endemic to machine generated lists, and pushes out perhaps a hundred or more words that, on the evidence of Diederich and the LASLA samples, not mention one's subjective impressions of Latin, should be included (e.g. potens, hortor).
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