How many words do you need for each English level?

English levels are usually described with the CEFR scale, from A1 for beginners to C2 for people who use English almost like a native speaker. The scale describes what you can do in the language: order food at A1, follow the news at B2, read a novel without trouble at C1. It doesn't say how many words you need for any of it.

Researchers have measured it anyway, by testing the vocabulary of learners whose level was already known. The numbers are useful, as long as you know what they measure.

What the research found

The best-known figures come from James Milton, who brought together results from studies of learners at known levels. He used a test that checks how many of the 5,000 most common English words a person knows. Here is roughly where learners at each level landed:

Notice where the table stops. The test only looks at the 5,000 most common words, so nobody can score more than 5,000 on it. A C2 speaker knows these words almost completely, but also knows thousands of rarer words that this kind of test never asks about. So the table is a good guide to the everyday core of the language, not to anyone's whole vocabulary.

It also shows how quickly the common words get covered. By B1, learners know more than half of them. After that the core fills in slowly, and most new progress comes from less common words.

How many words to read and listen comfortably

Another way to ask the question is: how many words do you need before a text stops feeling like hard work? Paul Nation looked at this in a well-known 2006 study.

The starting point is coverage, meaning the share of words in a text that you already know. If you know 98% of the words on a page, you meet about one unknown word in every fifty, a couple per paragraph. At that point most readers can follow the text and guess the new words from context. Below about 95% it starts to feel like a struggle.

Nation found that reaching 98% coverage takes about 8,000 to 9,000 word families for written English, such as novels and newspapers. Spoken English is simpler, and about 6,000 to 7,000 word families are enough for films and conversation.

Those are word families, which count "read", "reader" and "reading" as one. Counted as separate words, the totals are a good deal higher. That is why it's hard to compare numbers from different sources: they often count different things. We wrote more about this in How many words does a native English speaker know?

What to do with these numbers

If you're near the start, the most common words pay off fastest. A few thousand of them cover most of everyday English, and each one turns up again and again.

If you're around B1 or B2, reading becomes the main way to grow. Choose texts where you know most of the words, so the new ones make sense in context, and read a lot of them.

Whatever your level, compare yourself with yourself. A number from one vocabulary test, ours included, can't be lined up exactly with a number from another. Taking the same test again after a few months tells you much more.

Sources: Milton, J. (2010). The development of vocabulary breadth across the CEFR levels. In I. Bartning, M. Martin & I. Vedder (Eds.), Communicative proficiency and linguistic development. EUROSLA Monographs Series 1. Nation, I. S. P. (2006). How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening? The Canadian Modern Language Review, 63(1).