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When building a language for your world, words are "surprisingly" important. All natural language have words of some kind and only extremely experimental constructed languages lack them.

Word choice and categories are often difficult to create from scratch, so surely there must be a simpler way to create words?

Are there any lists that include words for lexicon creation?

To Cort’s notes, I am looking for a list containing a large amount of words, varying across all kinds of words, hence why the Swadesh list is insufficent

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  • $\begingroup$ Are you asking for a vocabulary list of "these are the N most common words that your new language will want to define"? $\endgroup$
    – SRM
    Sep 9, 2016 at 20:15
  • $\begingroup$ @SRM that would be an acceptable answer, links to such a list would also be good. $\endgroup$
    – TrEs-2b
    Sep 9, 2016 at 20:22
  • $\begingroup$ something like this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list ? $\endgroup$
    – MolbOrg
    Sep 9, 2016 at 20:23
  • $\begingroup$ @MolbOrg that list is too simple for my liking, so no $\endgroup$
    – TrEs-2b
    Sep 9, 2016 at 20:27
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    $\begingroup$ See also this question and its answers: conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/459/… $\endgroup$
    – Sir Cornflakes
    Apr 16, 2018 at 13:57

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These are lists of lemmatized word roots. Just pick a language that comes closest to suiting your needs.

http://www.lexiconista.com/datasets/lemmatization/

Edit:

The above link is dead. The relevant lists are now available on Github:

https://github.com/michmech/lemmatization-lists/

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  • $\begingroup$ interesting set of Slavic languages)) $\endgroup$
    – MolbOrg
    Sep 10, 2016 at 1:23
  • $\begingroup$ The link is dead $\endgroup$
    – Craeft
    Apr 14, 2021 at 1:44
  • $\begingroup$ @Craeft fixed, thank you! $\endgroup$
    – Nolo
    Apr 26, 2021 at 7:58
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Zompist.com's Conlanger's Lexipedia has the Fantasy Frequency Wordlist, which is a list of 1500 very common words, and can be found here (click the link to the text file near the top: http://www.zompist.com/resources/lex.html

There is also a set of wordlists at the back of the Language Construction Kit. As for assigning words to these, there is also a vocabulary generator, available here: http://www.zompist.com/gen.html

I hope this helps!

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I don't think he's actually published the List as of yet (it seems to be a long term work in progress), but you might consider checking out the Landau Core Vocabulary. I think this will end up beating the Swadesh List by at least an order of magnitude.

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