How many words for each CEFR level?

From about 500 words at A1 to 16,000 at C2 by the popular benchmarks, or about 120 to 9,000 word families in the research. The numbers differ because the sources count different things.

The table shows research test scores, research word-family estimates, and popular benchmarks side by side, so you can see why sources disagree.

The word counts for every CEFR level

*The popular benchmark column is the internet's doubling table, an extrapolation not found in the research. The other columns show figures measured or estimated by researchers: Milton and Alexiou's X_Lex bands and Nation's mapping.

How to read the table

The columns count different units. A word family groups a base word with its inflections and derivations. A lemma is a dictionary headword with its inflections. Other sources simply say "words" and blur the distinction. One word family represents roughly 1.6 to 2 individual words, so totals cannot be compared without checking the unit.

The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) publishes no official word counts. The test-score column reports how many of the 5,000 most common lemmas a learner recognizes, so its upper limit is not a claim about total vocabulary. Nation's figures estimate a broader vocabulary in word families.

These are receptive counts: words you recognize while reading or listening. Your active vocabulary, the words you can produce, will be smaller. Educated native speakers know well past 15,000 word families, so even the top learner estimates are not native-sized vocabularies.

Which number should you use?

Match the scale to your purpose. Use test scores for test preparation, word families for reading goals, and the popular numbers for a casual benchmark. Whichever scale you choose, which words you know matters more than the raw total because the high-frequency core does most of the work.

Sources: Milton and Alexiou, vocabulary size across the CEFR levels · Nation, Vocabulary and the CEFR · ILR, vocabulary size and reading coverage.