English's 'essential words' went abstract: what 70 years of vocab lists reveal

A Pudding data essay compares two teaching vocabularies for English-as-a-second-language learners: the 1953 General Service List (~2,300 words) and the 2023 New General Service List (~2,800 words), each built from real usage data to cover as much everyday English as possible with as few words as possible. Across the 70-year gap, roughly 600 words were dropped and over 1,100 added. Some swaps are obvious — telegraph out, computer/website/blog in; tobacco to cigarette — but the more telling changes are quieter: apple, fork, soap, umbrella, goat, flour, and bake all fell off, while mortgage, corporation, legislation, analysis, and assumption were added.

Running both lists through the UCREL Semantic Analysis System and Brysbaert’s concreteness ratings, the author shows a consistent drift: categories tied to the body, food, tools, and the natural world shrank, while institutional, commercial, and purely abstract terms grew. The vocabulary ‘moved outward,’ away from things you can hold and toward systems and concepts you merely navigate. That tracks the labor shift of the era — white-collar work overtook blue-collar by 1957, and by 2000 fewer than a quarter of US workers did manual labor.

The piece frames why this matters cognitively: concrete words benefit from ‘dual coding,’ pairing a verbal label with a sensory trace, which makes them stickier and faster to recall, whereas abstract words route through language alone. Treated as an indirect record of daily life, the lists suggest modern existence is less anchored to physical making and more mediated by institutions, categories, and ideas that shape us without occupying any physical space.