Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary 10th Edition

The English spoken by a professor in a lecture hall is different from the English written in an academic paper – and both are different from everyday conversation between friends, or the language used in popular fiction. If you are a student of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), it is important to become familiar with the vocabulary that you will come across when attending lectures and seminars, and that you will need for writing essays and reports.

The Oxford Phrasal Academic Lexicon, or OPAL for short, is a collection of four word lists that together provide an essential guide to the most important words to know in the field of EAP. The four lists cover both written and spoken academic English, with lists of written words, spoken words, written phrases and spoken phrases.

The words and phrases in OPAL are based on two main corpora, to give learners a true picture of academic English. The written words and phrases are based on the 71-million-word Oxford Corpus of Academic English (OCAE), a corpus composed of academic texts published by Oxford University Press across these four subject areas: physical sciences, life sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities. The spoken words and phrases are based on the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus¹. This corpus was developed at the Universities of Warwick and Reading and contains nearly 1.2 million words of spoken academic English, recorded and transcribed from lectures and seminars across the same four subject areas.

OPAL was developed using a method called ‘keyword analysis’. By comparing the list of the most frequent words and phrases in each corpus with the list of the most frequent words and phrases in a contrasting reference corpus, we identified the words and phrases that are most important in an academic setting. For the written lists, we compared the OCAE with the fiction subcorpus of the Oxford English Corpus. For the spoken lists, we compared the BASE corpus with the spoken subcorpus of the British National Corpus, containing recordings of meetings and everyday conversation.

Words that belong to the OPAL written and spoken word lists are indicated in the dictionary by symbols next to the headword: indicates a word on the OPAL written word list; indicates a word on the OPAL spoken word list; and indicates a word on both the written and spoken word lists.

To see the full lists, visit  www.opalwordlist.com. The written word list is divided into 12 sublists of 100 words each and the spoken word list is divided into 6 sublists of 100 words each. Sublist 1 of each list contains the most important academic words, with the next most important in Sublist 2, and so on.

It is often not the word itself that is ‘academic’, but the way it is used and combined with other words in an academic context. Therefore, besides the lists of single words, OPAL also includes a list of written phrases and a list of spoken phrases, which you can also find online. The phrase lists are grouped into academic functions. The written phrase list covers 15 different functions, including ‘Explaining and defining’ and ‘Giving examples and presenting evidence’. The spoken phrase list covers 16 functions, including ‘Signposting and focusing in lectures/lessons’ and ‘Using vague language’.

Whether you are using the print dictionary or accessing OPAL online (from which you can click through to the dictionary entries, either in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary online or in the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary of Academic English), it is important to realize that learning a word involves more than just knowing its basic meaning. Some words may have specific meanings in particular contexts: for example, the word environment (in Sublist 1 of the written list and Sublist 2 of the spoken list) may have a slightly different meaning, depending on whether the area of study is ecology, social science or computing. The dictionary entry will guide you on all the different meanings and also how to use them in context, with examples of use, frequent collocations and patterns with grammatical structures or prepositions.