Import your Longman 5000 PDF into Anki (free flashcard app).

If you have ever used the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE), you have seen the Longman 5000 in action. The dictionary uses a unique starring system:

The Longman Communication 5000 is derived primarily from the Longman Corpus Network (LCN) and heavily references the British National Corpus (BNC). The BNC is a 100-million-word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English from the late 20th century.

The selection process for the Longman 5000 was rigorous:

The result is a list that does not merely rank words by raw frequency, but categorizes them based on their communicative value in specific domains (speech vs. writing).

Many free word lists are simply frequency counts without context. Longman’s version is smarter:

| Feature | Longman 5000 | Generic lists | |--------|-------------|----------------| | Spoken vs. written frequency | ✅ Separate markers (S1, S2, W1, W2, W3) | ❌ | | Academic vocabulary | ✅ Highlighted | ❌ | | Example sentences | ✅ From real corpus | ❌ | | Word families | ✅ (e.g., decide, decision, decisive) | ❌ |

Each word gets a label like S1 (top 1000 spoken) or W3 (written frequency 3001–4000). That tells you how to learn it — first for speaking or first for writing.