This website is dedicated to the lexis of Business English and is based on research carried out in my thesis: Nelson, M. (2000) A Corpus-Based Study of Business English and Business English Teaching Materials. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Manchester: University of Manchester. The site was inspired by Averil Coxhead’s great Academic Word List site as I wanted teachers and learners of Business English to have a similar place to go to see the most significant words of  Business English. In my research, I created a 1 million word Business English Corpus (BEC) and the word lists you see on this site are based on it and comparisons made to general English using the BNC Sampler corpus as a reference. Please see the breakdown of the BEC corpus here. Feel free to use the data that is supplied here (with usual references) and also the materials I have developed based on the results. I will be adding to the site, so please come back every now and then. 

An overview of the work: What is business English?

EXAMPLES OF ANALYSIS OF BUSINESS LEXIS

The 100 most ‘key’ words in the Business English Corpus

Positive Business English Key Words: words that occur with unusual frequency in the BEC

Negative Keywords in the BEC: Words that occur with unusual INfrequency in the BEC

The 100 most frequent words in the Business English Corpus (lemmatised)

Analysis of the positive keywords in the BEC

Analysis of the negative keywords in the BEC

Analysis of two-word phrases