Virtuous English AcademyEnglish Vocabulary Lists — A1 to C1
Build your English word by word. These free, CEFR-levelled vocabulary lists cover 5,500 words across 125 everyday topics, from absolute beginner (A1) to advanced (C1) — every word with British pronunciation, an example sentence and instant flashcards.
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How many English words do you actually need?
Fewer than you fear, and more than any single list will give you. The often-quoted figure is that the most frequent 2,000 word families cover around 80% of the words in a typical English text, and the first 1,000 alone cover roughly three-quarters of ordinary speech. Coverage climbs steeply at first and then crawls: the jump from 2,000 to 3,000 families buys you several percentage points, while the jump from 8,000 to 9,000 buys a fraction of one. The practical implication is that the order you learn words in matters far more than the total, which is why every list on this site is built from frequency data and sorted into the topics those words actually appear in.
What each CEFR level gives you
A1 — Beginner
Around 500–1,000 word families. Enough to introduce yourself, describe your home and family, order food and handle a simple transaction. The 300 words in the A1 list are the highest-frequency core of that band.
300 words · 15 everyday topics
A2 — Elementary
Around 1,000–2,000 families. You can deal with routine situations, describe your background and immediate environment, and say how you feel with some precision rather than reaching for good and bad.
600 words · 20 topics
B1 — Intermediate
Around 2,000–3,200 families, the point at which you cover roughly 95% of everyday conversation. You can explain opinions, give reasons, and hold a discussion on a familiar subject without avoiding the difficult parts.
1,000 words · 25 topics
B2 — Upper-Intermediate
Around 3,200–4,500 families — about 98% coverage of a newspaper article, the threshold at which reading stops being work. This is the level universities and employers normally ask for.
1,500 words · 30 topics
C1 — Advanced
Around 5,000–8,000 families. Nearly everything in general use is now familiar; what is left is nuance, idiom and register — choosing the better word rather than finding a correct one.
2,100 words · 35 topics
How to learn vocabulary so it stays learned
Six habits that separate the learners who keep their words from the learners who relearn them. None of them takes long; all of them are supported by decades of research on how memory actually works.
Meet each word several times, briefly
A word enters long-term memory through repeated short encounters rather than one long study session. Most learners need to meet a new word somewhere between eight and a dozen times before it is genuinely theirs, which is an argument for short daily sessions and against weekend marathons.
Space the reviews out
Reviewing after one day, then three, then a week, then a month holds a word far longer than daily review does, and costs a fraction of the total time. This is the best-supported finding in memory research and the principle the flashcard trainer on this site is built on.
Retrieve, do not re-read
Looking at a word and its meaning together feels productive and does very little. Covering the answer and forcing yourself to produce it — even failing to — is what builds the pathway you need when speaking. Difficulty during practice is the point, not a problem.
Store the phrase, not the word
English will not let you do a mistake or make homework, and knowing the definitions of those words will never tell you so. Record every new item with the word that naturally sits beside it: make a decision, heavy traffic, catch a cold.
Read at the right difficulty
For a word to be guessable from context you need to know roughly 98% of the other words on the page. If you are looking up more than one word in fifty, the text is too hard to learn from — drop a level and read considerably more of it.
Use it within a day
Write one sentence with each new word that is actually true about you, or say it aloud in answer to a real question. Words attached to something personal survive; words attached to a translation pair fade. This step takes seconds and does more than another round of review.
Questions learners ask about building vocabulary
How many English words do I need to be fluent?
It depends on what you want to do, but the useful landmarks are these: 1,000 word families cover about three-quarters of ordinary speech, 3,000 take you to roughly 95% of conversation, and 8,000 to 9,000 cover almost everything in general use. Practical fluency in everyday life arrives somewhere around 3,000; comfortable reading of newspapers and novels needs closer to 8,000.
What is a word family, and why does it matter?
A word family groups a base word with its inflections and common derivatives — decide, decides, decided, decision, decisive, undecided counts as one family, not six. It matters because almost all published vocabulary-size figures are given in families, so a target of 3,000 families corresponds to a much larger raw word count. Once you know the base word, the family usually comes cheaply.
Are topic-based word lists better than frequency lists?
They serve different purposes and these lists combine both: the words are selected by frequency, then grouped by topic. Frequency decides what is worth your time; topic grouping is what makes it learnable, because related words give you enough material to say something complete about one subject. The one drawback — that similar words learned together can blur — is handled by reviewing those sets more often.
How long does it take to learn 1,000 new words?
At twenty words a day, five days a week, about ten weeks to meet them and rather longer to keep them, since review time grows as the collection does. Be sceptical of faster claims: they usually measure recognition immediately after study, which is the easiest possible test and the least predictive of whether you will have the word available in six months.
Is it better to use flashcards or read a lot?
Both, and they do different jobs. Flashcards are efficient at the first step — attaching a meaning to a form — and hopeless at teaching you how a word behaves. Reading and listening supply the context, collocation and register that flashcards cannot, but deliver repetitions too slowly on their own. The productive pattern is flashcards to learn the word and reading to earn it.
Are these vocabulary lists free?
Yes. Every level, every topic list, the phrasal verbs collection and the levelled stories are free to read with no account required, and the site is funded by advertising rather than subscriptions. Creating a free account only adds the optional extras — saving words to your own flashcard deck, tracking which topics you have finished, and syncing that progress between devices.