Skip to main content

Oxford Wordlist

A decorative image of the Oxford Wordlist logo

What is the Oxford Wordlist?

The Oxford Wordlist includes the 500 most frequently used words by children in their first three years of school. We've examined these word choices against the same demographic criteria used in the first research conducted 10 years ago, and explored what these word choices indicate about how children's identities and social experiences have changed in the past decade.

  • Developed by Australian experts for Australian schools
  • The most used wordlist in Australian Primary schools
  • Allows teachers to customise wordlists for targeted teaching
  • Wordlist is integrated into Oxford's literacy resources
  • Helps improve students' reading and writing outcomes

Build your Wordlist

A decorative image

The Oxford Wordlist Research Report

The 2017 Oxford Wordlist research study was conducted in Australian schools and sought to compare data with the first Oxford Wordlist research (An investigation of high frequency words in young children’s writing and reading development) conducted in 2007, and to provide an updated list of high frequency words for writing and reading.

The aim of this research study was to document the words children first write, to examine these choices against the same demographic criteria used in the first research study conducted 10 years ago, and to explore what these word choices indicate about how children’s identities and social experiences have changed in the past decade.

Read the report

From the expert

“In the Australian Curriculum a strong emphasis is placed on acknowledging the words students already have in their spoken repertoires. Teachers must intentionally expand their vocabularies, however, by teaching new words and this needs to start from the first year at school. This spoken vocabulary development has a symbiotic relationship with listening, reading, and writing (spelling).The more words students speak, the better placed they are to understand what others are saying, to know the meanings of words when they are reading, and to start using their burgeoning vocabularies in their writing.” 

Anne Bayetto, Wordlist 2018 researcher