When building a language for your world, words are "surprisingly" important. All natural language have words of some kind and only extremely experimental constructed languages lack them.

Word choice and categories are often difficult to create from scratch, so surely there must be a simpler way to create words?

Are there any lists that include words for lexicon creation?

To Cort’s notes, I am looking for a list containing a large amount of words, varying across all kinds of words, hence why the Swadesh list is insufficent

  • $\begingroup$ Are you asking for a vocabulary list of "these are the N most common words that your new language will want to define"? $\endgroup$ – SRM Sep 9 '16 at 20:15
  • $\begingroup$ @SRM that would be an acceptable answer, links to such a list would also be good. $\endgroup$ – TrEs-2b Sep 9 '16 at 20:22
  • $\begingroup$ something like this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list ? $\endgroup$ – MolbOrg Sep 9 '16 at 20:23
  • $\begingroup$ @MolbOrg that list is too simple for my liking, so no $\endgroup$ – TrEs-2b Sep 9 '16 at 20:27
  • $\begingroup$ did't meant exactly this, kinda like it, language core like. Actually anything like learn language in 14 days, phrasebook etc. In that direction there are vocabularies of different sizes, like different minimals to know. In print format it is more obvious, and was pretty common. They included words based on frequencies. Online corpus of language saw few resources - you should ask more linguistic oriented peoples(translators and such), google had some sort of corpus online with time graph how often and when it was used, cant remember link now, and doubt it could be used in form of database. $\endgroup$ – MolbOrg Sep 9 '16 at 20:54

These are lists of lemmatized word roots. Just pick a language that comes closest to suiting your needs.


  • $\begingroup$ interesting set of Slavic languages)) $\endgroup$ – MolbOrg Sep 10 '16 at 1:23

Zompist.com's Conlanger's Lexipedia has the Fantasy Frequency Wordlist, which is a list of 1500 very common words, and can be found here (click the link to the text file near the top: http://www.zompist.com/resources/lex.html

There is also a set of wordlists at the back of the Language Construction Kit. As for assigning words to these, there is also a vocabulary generator, available here: http://www.zompist.com/gen.html

I hope this helps!


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