They come from a 2023 list of about 2,800 words, shown to cover over 90% of general English use, intended for people learning the language. This 2023 list is an update of an earlier one, made in 1953, which identified about 2,300 words as the essential vocabulary to everyday life at the time. Between the two lists, 70 years apart, about 600 words were dropped, and over 1,100 were added. The rest remained as is. Some of the changes make immediate sense: Telegraph dropped out; computer was added, along with website and blog. Tobacco was replaced by cigarette. Motherhood became mom, and dad was added too, though fatherhood was never on the list to begin with. The world changed and vocabulary surely followed. But also: apple didn’t make the new list. Neither did fork, soap, umbrella or leaf, for example. It’s not that these things vanished from everyday life, but many han…

Bread stayed; breadmaking ingredients—flour and wheat—dropped. Cook is on the new list. Boil, bake, and fry are not. And many of the words that were added, such as mortgage, corporation, appropriate, analysis, fairly, and despite, don’t look anything like the ones that were discarded. In fact, they are mostly abstract concepts that don’t look like anything at all. These “essential vocabulary” lists are called the General Service List (1953) and the New General Service List (2013, revised in 2023). They were designed as teaching tools for people learning English as a second language, built from real-world usage data and extensively tested. The aim was a vocabulary list with as few words and as much coverage of everyday English usage. That coverage is high, over 90% for the 2023 list1 and about 84% for the 1953 list.2 To account for that much of the language, they had t…