GENERAL SERVICE LIST

GENERAL SERVICE LIST, short form GSL. Full title A General Service of English Words with semantic frequencies and a supplementary word-list for the writing of popular science and technology. A word list compiled and edited by Michael WEST for use by ELT teachers and writers, published in 1953 by Longmans, Green & Co., and based on earlier work done by West and others as a result of the Carnegie conference on vocabulary selection held in New York in 1934, whose purpose was the selection of vocabulary as a stage in the teaching of English. It incorporated material from A Semantic Count of English Words by Irving Lorge and Edward L. Thorndike (1938). The GSL greatly influenced the choice of vocabulary for EFL course materials, graded readers, and dictionaries until the mid-1970s. An entry lists a word with its part of speech, its frequency position in a count of 5m running words, and the percentages of its major sense divisions in that count: for example, game N., 638, fun and games 9%, with the idea of competition 38%, a particular contest 23%, games as an athletic contest 8%, and sundries. See FREQUENCY COUNT, VOCABULARY CONTROL.