The Most Frequent General Words in Nursing Journals

Background: General vocabulary is important in language learning. The frequency of general English vocabulary in nursing journals was investigated in the present study.

Materials and Methods: This is the report of the second part of a research on a corpus (collection of texts) of English nursing articles consisting of 2851 full-text and peer-reviewed articles with more than eight million words. The frequency of the general word types (WTs) was investigated, and a list of the most frequent 1000 general English word families (WFs), in two lists of 500, was selected.

Results: A total of 159 WTs covered 50% of all the words in the nursing journals. The two selected lists of 500 WFs covered 73.50% and 9.02% (82.52% in total) of all the words in the nursing journals, respectively

Conclusions: The two 500-WF lists of general English introduced in the present study can help nursing students to comprehend about 82% of all the words in English nursing journals.