What A2 vocabulary means
A2 learners handle routine tasks and simple exchanges about familiar matters: shopping, travel, work, past events and plans. A2 vocabulary adds the words for describing experiences (journey, borrow, decide), common adjectives and adverbs, and the verbs needed to talk about the past and the future.
With A1 and A2 words together, learners can follow simple emails, short descriptions and A2 graded readers, usually with a few look-ups per page.
The 100 most common A2 words
These are the words on the A2 list you will meet most often in real English texts. Start with them.
- been
- state
- even
- being
- last
- part
- while
- such
- used
- since
- company
- during
- next
- without
- system
- against
- support
- ever
- might
- base
- thought
- country
- area
- report
- few
- power
- government
- issue
- done
- however
- cause
- member
- public
- law
- seem
- include
- level
- die
- force
- enough
- national
- lead
- control
- act
- send
- far
- though
- follow
- fact
- less
- actually
- hit
- deal
- continue
- allow
- fall
- return
- whole
- court
- record
- single
- offer
- understand
- create
- death
- local
- increase
- least
- within
- cost
- receive
- release
- university
- pass
- human
- million
- given
- provide
- sound
- view
- research
- south
- bit
- air
- lost
- several
- low
- account
- market
- short / shorts
- probably
- yeah
- rate
- experience
- international
- possible
- film
- consider
- claim
- attack
A2 words by part of speech
| Part of speech | Most common examples |
|---|---|
| Nouns | state, being, part, company, system, support, base, thought, country, area |
| Verbs | been, done, cause, seem, include, die, send, follow, hit, continue |
| Adjectives | state, even, used, public, level, national, lead, far, whole, single |
| Adverbs | even, last, since, next, ever, however, enough, far, though, less |
How many words do you need for A2?
This list has 1,206 words. Together, the lists from A1 to A2 contain 2,253 words. The CEFR itself does not define word counts; these figures are the size of the CEFR-J and Octanove lists. Your real vocabulary also includes names, new words and specialist words that no list covers.
To measure your overall vocabulary, take the English vocabulary size test; it also estimates your CEFR level.
How to learn A2 words
A2 is the level where reading starts to do the work: short graded readers introduce the new words in context and repeat them. Save the ones you have to look up and review them with their sentences.
- Use the self-test above to see what share of the A2 words you already know.
- Pick one of the free A2 English books and start reading.
- Tap any word you don't know in Okuzeka to see its meaning in that sentence, in your language.
- Save useful words as flashcards with their sentences and review them over the next few days.
- When you score above 85%, move on to the B1 list.
Where this list comes from
The A1–B2 words come from the CEFR-J Wordlist, compiled by the CEFR-J project at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
Okuzeka kept the single-word headwords and sorted them by word frequency. Other lists, such as the Cambridge English Vocabulary Profile or the Oxford 3000/5000, may give some words a different level, and a word's level can depend on the meaning being taught.
