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VOCABULARY LIST

Business English Certificate (BEC)

Preliminary

BEC Preliminary W ordlist
© UCLES 2006

Introduction to the BEC Preliminary Wordlist
The BEC Preliminary Wordlist gives teachers a guide to the vocabulary needed when preparing students
for the BEC Preliminary examination.
Background to the list
The BEC Preliminary Vocabulary list was originally developed by CambridgeESOL in consultation with
external consultants to guide item writers who produce materials for the BEC Preliminary examination. It
includes vocabulary from the Council of Europe’s Threshold (1990) specification and business-related
vocabulary which corpus evidence shows is high frequency.
The list covers vocabulary appropriate to this level of English and includes receptive vocabulary (wordsthat the candidate is expected to understand but which is not the focus of a question), and productive
vocabulary (words that the candidate needs to know to answer a question).
The list does not provide an exhaustive list of all words which appear on BEC Preliminary question
papers and candidates should not confine their study of vocabulary to the list alone.
How the list is updated
Usage ofbusiness language can change rapidly, as shown by the growth of email correspondence and
associated vocabulary in the last ten years. In order to maintain its currency, the wordlist is updated on
an annual basis by the addition and removal of words, using a corpus-based approach. Suggested
additions to the wordlist are collated and the frequency of these words is obtained by reference toestablished corpora (electronic databases). The corpora in question represent receptive and productive
language in business and general contexts. The main corpora used for the validation of the BEC
Preliminary wordlist are:
• the Cambridge Learner corpus (CLC) which includes over 20 million words of written learner
English at six levels;
• the British National Corpus (BNC) which includes 100million words of written and spoken native
speaker data, including four million business-oriented words;
• a web-derived corpus of business-related articles which includes 120,000 words from US and UK
business articles.
How the list is organised
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Word sets
Some categories of words which a learner at this level might be expected to know are not
included in the alphabetical list but appearseparately in Appendix 1. These include word sets
such as numbers; days of the week; months of the year; countries and languages.

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Exemplification
Example phrases and sentences are given only where words which can be used with different
meanings have been restricted in the extent of their usage at BEC Preliminary level. For
example, trust is exemplified as it will only be used on a BECPreliminary paper with the meaning
of having confidence in someone or something, and not with the meaning of a financial
arrangement (such as trust fund or trust unit).

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Prefixes and suffixes
A list of possible prefixes and suffixes is provided in Appendix 2 and these may be combined with
the vocabulary items in the list as appropriate. Unemployment, for example, is not included on
thealphabetical list, as it is formed from a word on the list – employ – in combination with two of
the allowable affixes – un and ment.

BEC Preliminary W ordlist
© UCLES 2006

2

Words with an affix which is not included in the appendix appear within the alphabetical list.
Reliability, for example, is listed, as the suffix – ity is not included in Appendix 2, as it is
considered to bedifficult for this level.
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Compound w ords
Compound words are not included in the list where both individual words are present and where
the meaning of the compound is literal and transparent, eg businessman. A similar approach has
been adopted for two-word and hyphenated compounds, for example, leisure centre and handmade.

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Multi-w ord verbs
Multi-word verbs are not included in the...