What Is the Academic Word List, and Should You Study It?

If you've prepared for an academic English exam or taken a university English for Academic Purposes course, you've probably run into the Academic Word List, usually shortened to AWL, without necessarily knowing exactly what it is or how it was built.

What the AWL actually is

The Academic Word List is a set of roughly 570 word families that were found, through analysis of a large body of academic texts across disciplines, to appear far more often in academic writing than in everyday English. Crucially, it deliberately excludes the most basic, already-common English words, the list is specifically the vocabulary that shows up once writing gets academic, not the vocabulary that shows up everywhere.

What kind of words actually make the list

AWL words tend to be exactly the kind of precise, slightly formal words that let a writer make a specific, defensible claim rather than a vague general one, similar in flavor to words like significant, crucial, and essential. They're not obscure or rare; they're words that specifically cluster in essays, research papers, and lectures far more than in casual conversation.

Should you study the list directly?

Studying the raw list has a real limitation: a list divorced from context teaches recognition, not use, and academic vocabulary specifically needs to be used with the right register and precision to actually help you in an essay or exam response. Studying AWL words the same way you'd study any other vocabulary, in context, spaced over time, tested with genuine recall, tends to outperform simply memorizing the list top to bottom.

Where AWL vocabulary shows up on Wordabulary

A large share of AWL vocabulary sits naturally in the B2 to C1 range of the CEFR scale, which is exactly the range Wordabulary leans on for professional and academic vocabulary building. Our TOEFL vocabulary guide and our IELTS vocabulary guide both cover how this kind of academic vocabulary maps onto specific exam requirements, and our overview of what IELTS tests covers where vocabulary fits among everything else being scored.

Curious how much AWL-adjacent vocabulary you've already absorbed without realizing it? The placement quiz is a faster way to find out than guessing.