#lexicons

Helpful Word Lists

I periodically search for helpful word lists to use when I'm starting (or picking back up) a constructed language (English words, specifically, because that's my native language), and I've found several helpful ones over the years. If you're getting started on a new conlang or maybe you're stuck on what words your language might need, try checking out some of these lists to help get you going. Most of them are split up by either part of speech or "type" of word, so they're great resources:

The Swadesh List

The Swadesh List is a list of about 100 words/concepts used for linguistic comparison named after Morris Swadesh. It's a very handy list that's helpful for getting started on building your conlang's lexicon, but 100 words is really not very many words. The famous toki pona conlang (Wikipedia link, or here's a more useful website if you're interested in learning it) has about 120 "official" words, and even then, many words do double duty (or more) to get a full breadth of concepts across! (Please note: this is not a criticism of toki pona in the slightest—most of my conlangs aim to be as streamlined as toki pona...and fail.)

Basic English

Basic English is an auxlang designed by Charles Ogden in 1925 to simplify English down to its most essential words for communication. Putting aside criticisms of the auxlang, it's a very useful list of anywhere from 850–2000 words to help get a good idea of words that you might want to include in your conlang! Apparently, the 2000-word Basic English list and "Voice of America's Special English 1500 word list" are all that's used for Wikipedia's nifty Simple English translation of their articles.

Word Frequency List(s)

Wikipedia has a list of the top 100 most common English words, and they do the great courtesy of separating them by part of speech on the page! As I said before, while this is very helpful, 100 is a pretty small collection of words. You can find other larger word lists from random sites, but the ones I've seen don't separate the list by part of speech, which is not particularly helpful for conlanging...

I recently hit the jackpot in my search for word lists when I found https://www.wordfrequency.info, where they provide the top 5000 words from the Corpus of Contemporary American English in order of frequency AND by part of speech! The whole list can be found on that site here: https://www.wordfrequency.info/free.asp?s=y and here is an archive link to the free page just in case it ever gets lost to time.

5000 words is a lot to sift through, but I'm planning on going through and grouping similar words for my own use and sharing it here. This may not be useful to everyone, but as I mentioned earlier, most of my conlangs aim to emulate toki pona's simplicity and small number of words, so combining words with similar meanings is something I end up doing anyway.

A Conlanger’s Thesaurus

Soon after posting this, I was made aware of this very handy document that was originally posted in 2014 and was updated January 2020 called A Conlanger’s Thesaurus by William S. Annis (here’s a direct link to PDF). The document is particularly helpful because it includes notes and helpful details in addition to just the raw words!

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