About Core 3000

With about 3,000 well-chosen English words you can follow most everyday conversation, news, and workplace English. The remaining words you pick up from context. This site is a place to actually learn those 3,000 — not a wall of lemmas.

The vocabulary test

You start with ten multiple-choice questions, with no time limit. They cover everyday through less common words. We place you at the highest band where you got at least two right, then suggest forty words at that level (missed test words first). It is a placement hint, not an official exam score.

How the list was chosen

Headwords start from the New General Service List (NGSL), a learner-oriented frequency list covering roughly 92% of general English texts, then fill out to 3,000 with the next most frequent lemmas from a public web-frequency list. This is not EF’s published list and not the Oxford 3000.

Frequency bands

A1–B2 tags are frequency bands, not official CEFR labels from the English Vocabulary Profile. Rank 1–700 is tagged A1, 701–1500 A2, 1501–2300 B1, and 2301–3000 B2.

Your progress

Reviews use a simplified SM-2 schedule (Forgot / Got it). Progress lives in this browser’s local storage. It does not sync across devices, and nobody else can see it.

Sources and licenses

• New General Service List — Browne, Culligan & Phillips, CC BY 4.0.
• Frequency padding — google-10000-english.
• Definitions and example phrases — Princeton WordNet 3.0/3.1. WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. Used under the WordNet license.
• Pronunciations — CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (public domain), shown as IPA.

Audio uses your browser’s speech synthesis. Definitions are short dictionary glosses; they can sound more academic than a learner dictionary.