The Cambridge Young Learner's English series of standardized English tests recommends that students of a certain level should already know certain English words. This dataset collects into a tidy csv file those words in both British and American English, the levels at which they should be known, their parts of speech, and thematic category.
There is also a Google Sheets which you can copy and query more quickly: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_JpZPO8QjzKbOrhq75Pu4JFsc7bTBonr16KxAigXrFw/edit?usp=sharing
I pulled all of the data from 149681-yle-flyers-word-list.pdf, which is an official test prep resource distributed freely by Cambridge English and hosted on the Cambridge English website. https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/images/149681-yle-flyers-word-list.pdf
Nothing fancy, just a lot of copying, pasting, a spreadsheet, and overabundant free time.
The data comprises 1,114 rows of data, 1 header row, and 39 columns. All data is either a string or boolean.
The first two columns, britsh and american contain all of the words in British and American English, respectively. They are usually identical except for cases like "mum" vs. "mom". I considered leaving the american column blank except for only those cases where its different from british but decided against because it allows people working primary with American English to write simpler queries.
The irregular_plural column predictably contains entries that are irregular plurals of nouns, such as child -> children. All other rows are an empty string.
There are 36 boolean columns that can divided into 3 kinds: part of speech, YLE level, and theme.
- part of speech:
adjective,adverb,conjunction,determiner,discourse_marker,exclamation,interrogative,noun,possessive,preposition,pronoun,title,verb. - YLE level:
starters,movers,flyers. - theme:
animals,body_and_face,clothes,colours,family_and_friends,food_and_drink,health,home,materials,names,numbers,places_and_directions,school,sports_and_leisure,time,toys,transport,weather,work,world_around_us.
This dataset is not a direct copy from the source material. It contains some opinionated changes made in the interest of completeness, clarity, and query-ability.
- Additional context has been added to many words within the
britishandamericancolumns. Context always follows its word and is wrapped in parentheses. There are two kinds of context. One type is phrasal, e.g. catch (a ball) or break (take a). Notice that normal grammatical order is not preserved in some cases. Another kind of context is categorical, e.g. keyboard (computer) or letter (alphabet). Often the context was already perfectly clear from the categories, but I wanted every value in the two vocabulary columns to be unique. - The word for was listed under Starters as a preposition (e.g., "This is for you.") and under Flyers as a preposition of time (e.g., "For an hour."). In this dataset both variations are categorized as only a preposition, but the two versions are accompanied by context hints. The Starters word is now for (you) and the Flyers word is for (an hour).
- The word businessman / woman was split into two words, businessman and businesswoman and irregular plurals were added.
- mom was added as the American English equivalent of mum.
- Changed so {
adverb,discourse_marker,starters} and so {adverb,conjuntion,flyers} into so (...) {discourse_marker,starters}, so (big) {adverb,starters}, and so (a ... b) {conjunction,flyers}. - Changed well (feel) {
adjective,adverb,movers} in to well {adjective,movers} and well (do) {adverb,movers}.
Pre A1 Starters, A1 Movers, and A2 Flyers are copyright Cambridge University Press and Cambridge English Assessment.
This dataset is a transformative derivative work distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license (a.k.a CC-BY-SA-4.0). See LICENSE.txt for more information or visit https://choosealicense.com/licenses/cc-by-sa-4.0/