A Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary American English: word sketches, collocates, and thematic lists is an invaluable tool for all learners of American English, providing a list of the 5,000 most frequently used words in the language.

The dictionary is based on data from a 385-million-word corpus—evenly balanced between spoken English (unscripted conversation from radio and TV shows), fiction (books, short stories, movie scripts), more than 100 popular magazines, ten newspapers, and 100 academic journals—for a total of nearly 150,000 texts.

All entries in the rank frequency list feature the top 20–30 collocates (nearby words) for that word, which provide valuable insight into the meaning and usage. Alphabetical and part of speech indexes are provided for ease of use. The dictionary also contains 31 thematically organized and frequency-ranked lists of words on a variety of topics, such as family, sports, and food. New words in the language, differences between American and British English, and grammar topics such as the most frequent phrasal verbs are also covered.

A Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary American English is an engaging and efficient resource enabling students of all levels to get the most out of their study of vocabulary. It is also a rich resource for language teaching , research, curriculum design, and materials development.

Mark Davies is Professor and Dee Gardner is Associate Professor, both at the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Brigham Young University at Provo, Utah.