The Academic Word List was developed by Coxhead (2000) from analyses of college texts. Of the 570 words on that list, 343 are among the 4,000 simple word families. Most of the words belong to word families with at least several members among the most frequent words in English.
Academic vocabulary words are important in school and scholarly texts. Words such as connection, composition, and system are unique to school texts and are not used frequently in common conversations or simple text. Academic words are used to describe and explain ideas in content-area texts but are not the words that communicate the substance of a content area. For example, system might be used to describe weather but is not a word specific to the topic of weather.
