<p>Thanks lotf629 for your word lists.</p>
<p>I wonder who sets the level for the words. Why do you know "the" has level 1 and "free" level 6. I'm just curious :D</p>
<p>Hey Engstu214041,</p>
<p>I got the levels from someone else's very generous work: Alan Beale, a guy with a computer programming background, put together a huge database of common words indexed by frequency. He based his frequency counts on a research project by Google: apparently, at one point or another, Google decided it would be fun to rank words by frequency. Beale converted these frequency counts into levels and published them, and I put his levels into a database. </p>
<p>I use his levels because I find that they correlate (most of the time) with my own intuitive judgments of word frequency and importance. I read a lot, so I think I have pretty good instincts for "important words" and "unimportant words." Beale's rankings usually (not always, but nearly always) correspond to my gut feeling about which words you need to know (as an SAT taker).</p>
<p>If you are interested in Alan Beale's work (or want to find out even more about these frequency counts), his research is available at </p>
<p>The</a> 12dicts Word Lists.</p>
<p>You have to download his word lists to read most of his documentation (I guess he changed the site; I think you used to be able to find the info on one of his web pages), but if you're curious, the info is available.</p>
<p>On the off chance that anybody with a more sophisticated background in computational linguistics is reading this:</p>
<p>I tried indexing these lists against more up-to-date corpora such as the British National Corpus, and I found that the data was no more reliable (for SAT/academic English purposes) than the more accessible lists provided by Beale. PM me if you want to know more.</p>
<p>If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't sweat it.</p>
<p>It's back up, you guys, but at a different address: Real</a> Vocabulary.</p>
<p>Sorry that I took it down. I was trying to fix it, but it took forever. I won't take it down again, I swear. </p>
<p>Best of luck to you all!</p>