Originally designed to examine the size and development of L2 writers’ productive vocabularies, early research used lexical frequency profiles to compare the vocabulary in L2 writers’ texts to word frequency lists, typically the first (1K) and second (2K) most frequent word families according to the General Services List (GSL; West, 1953) in combination with either (a) the University Word List (UWL; Xue & Nation, 1984) or (b) the Academic Word List (AWL; Coxhead, 2000). Vocabulary that did not appear in any of these lists was simply described as “beyond” the 2K frequency band.