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| The General Service List is a list of roughly 2000 words
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 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. In the original
publication the relative frequencies of various senses of the
words were also included. 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,