Abstract: Based on Coxhead's Academic Word List, we discussed principles and methods in corpus making. The process can be classified as five steps, that is, clarifying the purpose of list making, creating a suitable corpus, deciding the unit of counting, defining the criteria for word selection and testing the list on an independent corpus. We also suggested that there should be a great need for improving the current word lists and developing the word list for specific purposes.

Key words: corpus, word list making, academic word list (AWL)