IELTS Academic vocabulary sources

Source

New Academic Word List (NAWL) 1.2 by Charles Browne and Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips.

NAWL 1.2 is a research-based collection of 957 academic headwords designed to complement general English vocabulary. It is supplementary practice for IELTS Academic, not an official IELTS word list, complete test preparation, or an endorsement by IELTS.

License

The original list and our adapted selection are available under CC BY-SA 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International). When sharing or adapting the list, credit the authors, link to the license, note your changes, and share adaptations under the same license.

Changes made by Inoh

We selected 957 of 957 source entries.

• Retained all 957 publisher headwords and their alphabetized source positions.
• Selected one supported meaning per headword, reviewing every multiple-sense case and low-scoring accepted match.
• Corrected publisher part-of-speech errors and unusable contexts while retaining the original definition and part of speech.
• Mapped bacteria to bacterium, headquarter to headquarters, onwards to onward, amino to amino acid, and prefix forms to conventional hyphenated display.
• Matched all selected words to reviewed dictionary meanings and added missing meanings.

Download the word list (JSON), including original headwords and documented forms.