Lexical coverage and profiling

Corpus-driven analysis of multi-million-word corpora has enabled researchers to create word frequency lists, which have been used together with software to profile the distribution of words at different frequency levels within texts. This analysis of vocabulary provides an indication of the difficulty level of a text, the potential for vocabulary learning through reading or listening to the text, as well as the vocabulary knowledge required to understand different types of spoken and written discourse. This area of research is known as lexical coverage or lexical profiling.