GSL - gm's hmm... page
GSL
The General Service List is a list of roughly 2000 words considered to be of the greatest "general service" to learners of English. It was published by Michael West in 1953. The words were selected to represent the most frequent words of English and were taken from a corpus of written English. The GSL is not a list based solely on frequency, but includes groups of words on a semantic basis. . They are not the most common 2,000 words, though frequency was one of the factors taken into account in making the selection. Each of the 2,000 words is a headword representing a word family that is only loosely defined in West. Frequency numbers for the words and frequency data for the various meanings of words are also given.
The target audience was English language learners and ESL teachers. To maximize the utility of the list, some frequent words that overlapped broadly in meaning with words already on the list were omitted. The list is important because a person who knows all the words on the list and their related families would understand approximately 90-95 percent of colloquial speech and 80-85 percent of common written texts. The list consists only of headwords, which means that the word "be" is high on the list, but assumes that the person is fluent in all forms of the word, e.g. am, is, are, was, were, being and been. This list has had a wide influence for many years, serving as the basis for graded readers as well as other material.
Researchers have expressed doubts about the adequacy of the GSL because of its age and the relatively low coverage provided by the words not in the first 1000 words of the list. Recent research has confirmed that the General Service List was in need of minor revision, but the headwords in the list still provide approximately 80% text coverage in written English. The research showed that the GSL contains a small number of archaic terms, such as shilling, while excluding words that have gained currency since the first half of the twentieth century, such as plastic, television, battery, okay, victim and drug. Texts based on the GSL are still on sale, but the list itself is out of print; it only exists in virtual form via the Internet. Various versions float around the Internet, and attempts have been made to improve it.
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