This paper introduces a novel Academic Vocabulary List (AVL), distinguishing between academic and other materials, and comprising about 14% of academic materials in both COCA (120 million+ words) and the British National Corpus (33 million+ words). The paper considers how the AVL can be employed in contexts where academic English makes up the instructional focus. It also presents a new web-based interface that can be employed to acquire AVL words, and to recognize and interact with AVL words in any text imported in the search window.