The Academic Word List (AWL) is a word list of 570 English words which appear with great frequency in a broad range of academic texts. The target readership is English as a second or foreign language students intending to enter English-medium higher education, and teachers of such students. The AWL was developed by Averil Coxhead at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and divided into ten sublists in decreasing order of frequency. The AWL excludes words from the General Service List (the 2000 highest-frequency words in general texts); however, many words in the AWL are general vocabulary rather than restricted to an academic domain, such as area, approach, create, similar, and occur in Sublist One.