The Academic Word List (AWL) is a compilation of words from college materials: academic journals, complete textbooks or course books, chapters from college textbooks, and other academic sources. The resultant 414 source materials yielded 3,513,330 tokens (all words) and 70,377 types (individual words). The total group of words (corpus) was divided into four categories: Arts, Commerce, Law, and Science.

Words were then selected for the AWL if they were not among the first 2,000 most frequently occurring words of English and if they occurred at least 10 times in each of the four main categories. Words are grouped in Sublists according to how often they appear in the source materials, Sublist 1 words occur most frequently - on an average of once every 4.3 pages and words in Sublist 10 occur least frequently, once in 82.5 pages.

You can find out more about the AWL in this article: Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34 (2).

In addition, the entire AWL can be downloaded and printed. It can be found at http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/research/awl/