King Salman Global Academy releases Riyadh List of 5,000 common Arabic words

The King Salman Global Academy for the Arabic Language has released the “Riyadh List of Common Words in Contemporary Arabic,” featuring 5,000 of the most frequently used words in modern Arabic. The list aims to provide a reliable linguistic resource for lexicographical studies, Arabic language education, artificial intelligence applications, and Arabic language processing, as part of the Academy’s efforts to develop linguistic resources and data.

According to a statement from the Academy on its X platform account, the list is based on a massive linguistic corpus containing approximately 1,746,934,881 words from more than 2,573,805 texts. These were collected from diverse sources, including newspapers, books, academic theses, peer-reviewed journals, magazines, websites, lectures, seminars, curricula, news agencies, official publications, and more.

Abdullah bin Saleh Al-Washmi, Secretary-General of the Academy, said that developing data-driven linguistic resources supports studies and applications related to the Arabic language, providing reliable references to help researchers and specialists study vocabulary, usage, frequency, and linguistic features. He emphasized that launching the Riyadh List is part of the Academy’s work to build and make available linguistic resources, supporting the presence of Arabic in scientific, technical, and educational fields.

The list uses the lemma (dictionary form) as the unit of count, with all words in the corpus analyzed both lexically and morphologically. Different word forms were traced back to their lemmas, and the results underwent comprehensive human linguistic review. Certain language elements with specific usage, such as numbers, abbreviations, punctuation marks, and proper names, were excluded.

The Riyadh List provides multiple linguistic details for each word, including part of speech, word roots, semantic fields, synonym and antonym relations, and classification by origin. The words are presented interactively and with audio, sorted by frequency, part of speech, and alphabetically, enabling researchers and specialists to benefit from the data in various fields.

The list offers quantitative evidence of word frequency in contemporary Arabic texts, supporting prioritization in dictionary compilation, vocabulary selection, content development for Arabic language teaching, and studies on word distribution and characteristics. It also aids in Arabic text processing and educational computing applications, such as text analysis and readability assessment.

The “Riyadh List of Common Words in Contemporary Arabic” is available as a digital book in the Academy’s digital library: https://https://library.ksaa.gov.sa/index، and interactively on the Falak linguistic corpora platform: https://falak.ksaa.gov.sa/frequency-lists/methodology، including detailed statistical data to expand its use in linguistic research and applications.

The King Salman Global Academy for the Arabic Language continues to develop and make available linguistic resources and data through its programs, initiatives, and projects, supporting Arabic content, scientific research, and the development of technologies and applications related to the Arabic language.

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