The GCSE French Vocabulary List: How It Works and How to Use It

For the first time, GCSE French has a finite vocabulary target. The reformed specifications prescribe a defined list, and a student who learns it can be confident they have learned enough. That is a genuine change, and most revision advice has not caught up with what it means.

This page explains how the lists work (how they were built, what counts as one item, what the 2% rule actually allows, and where the traps are) and links to the official lists. It does not reproduce them. The lists are the boards' own material and they publish them free; the useful thing to add is how to use them.

For the qualification as a whole, see the GCSE French guide; for grammar, the grammar by tier guide.

"Prescribed" means three different things

This is the distinction that matters most, and it is worth getting straight before you plan any revision:

  • AQA and Edexcel prescribe what you must know, while reserving a small, defined margin for unfamiliar words in the reading paper.
  • WJEC prescribes what the exam may use. Its specification says assessment materials will only use vocabulary from its list. No cognate allowance, no glossed unknowns. It is a genuinely closed list.
  • CCEA prescribes a minimum (its list is titled "Core Minimum Vocabulary List") and reserves no margin because it promises no ceiling. Its specification says outright that students can expect to meet unfamiliar vocabulary, and that Higher tier students should be able to deal with unfamiliar language.

So on WJEC, finishing the list means the exam holds no unknown words. On AQA and Edexcel it means almost that, with a small allowance. On CCEA it means you have reached the starting line. Revision strategy there is genuinely different, and a student using an English board's approach on a CCEA paper will be unpleasantly surprised.

Which boards this applies to

Worth stating plainly, because it is not obvious from the boards' own websites:

  • AQA (8652) and Pearson Edexcel (1FR1) are the reformed English specifications, first assessed 2026. They are the two that are directly comparable.
  • Eduqas no longer offers GCSE French. It discontinued its whole modern languages GCSE suite, with the final assessment in Summer 2025. Some pages on the Eduqas site have not been updated and still describe a draft specification going through accreditation; they are out of date.
  • WJEC's GCSE French is a separate Welsh qualification, approved by Qualifications Wales, first teaching 2025, first award 2027, and not available to centres in England.
  • CCEA has not reformed. Northern Ireland is still running the 2017 specification.

How big is it, really

On both AQA and Edexcel:

  • 1,200 items at Foundation.
  • A further 500 at Higher, 1,700 in total.
  • Plus 30 short multi-word phrases and 20 geographical or cultural items, including country names, on top of those totals. So the realistic figures are closer to 1,250 and 1,750.

WJEC publishes no item count at all, and CCEA's list is a minimum rather than a total, so neither can be quantified the same way.

Where the words came from

Both AQA and Edexcel built their lists from the same corpus, Lonsdale and Le Bras's A Frequency Dictionary of French (Routledge, 2009), and both state the same threshold: at least 85% of the selected vocabulary comes from the 2,000 most frequent words in the language.

That has a practical consequence. These are not arbitrary lists. They are overwhelmingly the words French actually uses most, which means time spent on them transfers directly to reading real French, and to A Level. Learning the list is not exam-cramming in the pejorative sense.

WJEC says its list is based on high-frequency, high-utility vocabulary but names no corpus, so there is no way to check what "high frequency" means there.

What counts as one item

This matters because 1,200 items is not 1,200 things to memorise: it is both more and less than it sounds.

Verbs count once. You are expected to know the conjugated forms produced by the grammar you have been taught. The list carries the verb; the grammar list carries the endings. So one entry can be a full paradigm.

Multiple meanings are handled differently by the two boards. AQA lists a word with several English translations as a single entry where the part of speech is the same. Edexcel takes the same approach but frames it as an obligation: where several meanings are listed, students are required to know all of them. Practically, treat every listed meaning as learnable on both boards.

Transparent compounds are left out. Where a compound can be worked out from its parts and those parts are already listed, it does not get its own entry. Where it cannot, it does. So the list is shorter than a naive count of French expressions would suggest, and word-building is doing some of the work.

Edexcel marks alternative spellings with a caret. Where post-reform spelling variants exist, both are accepted in assessment even though only one appears on the list.

The trap in Edexcel's list

If you teach or sit Edexcel, this is the single most likely cause of under-preparation.

Edexcel puts irregular inflected verb forms in the vocabulary appendix, not the grammar appendix, and tiers them separately, in two tables. An asterisk on an infinitive in the verb list is the signal: this verb has irregular forms you must learn as vocabulary items, not merely as an application of a rule.

Three consequences:

  1. A student revising only from the grammar appendix will miss them entirely. They are not there.
  2. Moving up to Higher means acquiring new forms of verbs you already know, not only new verbs. The second table is Higher-only.
  3. They are finite and countable, because they sit under vocabulary rules rather than grammar rules. That makes them one of the most efficient revision sets on the specification, a closed list of exactly the forms that will not come out of a rule.

AQA handles the same problem differently, folding irregular high-frequency forms into the 1,200 and 1,700 totals rather than tabling them separately.

The 2% rules

Both AQA and Edexcel allow a margin in the reading paper, and it is two separate allowances, not one:

  • Up to 2% of a text may be cognates from outside the list, unglossed. A cognate here means a word where the substantial majority of letters are the same in English and French and the meaning is the same.
  • Up to 2% may be non-list words that are glossed, marked and translated for you. On AQA this glossing allowance is stated for Higher and overlapping tier texts.

So in a 200-word text you might meet around four unglossed cognates and around four glossed unknowns. That is the entire exposure. It is not a reason to worry, and it is a reason to practise recognising cognates confidently rather than freezing at an unfamiliar shape.

Proper nouns: AQA says unfamiliar place names and similar can be glossed: permissive wording, not a guarantee. Do not assume every unfamiliar name will be explained.

Does going beyond the list help?

No, and that is the point.

AQA states that vocabulary and grammar not on the defined list are given equal credit to items on it, in writing and in speaking. Edexcel says the same, and its FAQ answers the question directly: students can reach the highest marks on every paper without using words beyond the list.

WJEC puts it most sharply: equal but no additional credit.

Two things follow. There is no penalty for ambition, so a student who knows more should use it freely. But there is no bonus either, so hunting for impressive off-list vocabulary is not a route to marks. A student who has secured the list and can deploy it accurately across three time frames will beat one who has half-learned it and decorated the gaps.

The dictation exception

The dictation deliberately includes words from outside the list, because it tests whether you can write French sounds rather than whether you recognise vocabulary.

AQA Edexcel
Foundation 2 words from outside the list 2 words from outside the list
Higher 2 words from outside the list 3 words from outside the list
Length Minimum 20 words Foundation, 30 Higher Not stated in the specification; implied by a 90%-from-the-list rule

Note that Edexcel's figure appears in its FAQ document rather than the specification itself. More on the task in the listening guide.

How to actually revise from it

  1. Start in Year 10. 1,200 items over two years is about twelve words a week. Over one term it is unmanageable. This is the single biggest determinant of whether the list feels finite or overwhelming.
  2. Work in frequency order, not alphabetical order. The lists are built from a frequency corpus, so the highest-value items are identifiable. Learning the commonest 300 words first buys disproportionate comprehension.
  3. Know how your board's list is sorted before you print it. Edexcel's is alphabetical by English within part-of-speech groups, so a student who meets a French word and wants to look it up cannot scan for it. AQA publishes a filterable spreadsheet instead. Neither is a list you read top to bottom.
  4. Test recall in both directions, but weight it. Reading and listening need French to English; writing and speaking need English to French, which is much harder and where the marks are. Most students over-practise the easy direction.
  5. Learn verbs with their prepositions and nouns with their gender, from the first encounter. Both are far more expensive to fix later than to learn correctly once.
  6. Say it aloud. AQA publishes an audio sound bank keyed to its list. The dictation and the read-aloud task both assess sound-to-spelling, and a word you have only ever seen is a word you cannot spell from hearing.
  7. Do not stop at the list. It is a floor for confidence, not a ceiling on ambition, and on CCEA it is explicitly only a floor.

Where to get the official lists

All free, all from the boards themselves. Link to qualification pages rather than bookmarking file URLs. AQA in particular is migrating where it hosts documents.

AQA (8652)

Pearson Edexcel (1FR1)

  • Qualification page: start here
  • Specification (Issue 2): the authoritative list is Appendix 1, from page 108, with the irregular verb tables at pages 137 and 145
  • Vocabulary and grammar guide: explains what changed from the 2016 specification
  • The interactive vocabulary tool is a macro-enabled spreadsheet (.xlsm), linked from the qualification page. Some school systems block that file type. The specification appendix is the fallback.

WJEC (Wales)

  • Qualification page
  • The core vocabulary is Appendix B of the specification. A spreadsheet version exists, but WJEC notes that the appendix is the authoritative version where the two differ.

CCEA (Northern Ireland)

  • Qualification page
  • The Core Minimum Vocabulary List is Appendix 5 of the specification. CCEA publishes no standalone version, and the list is thematic rather than alphabetical and is not tiered: the same list applies at both tiers.

Related

If you want help working out where a student actually is against the list, that is a good use of a first conversation. You can read more on the French tutoring page, or book a free 15-minute call.

This page describes how the awarding bodies' vocabulary lists are constructed and used; it does not reproduce them. The lists are published free by each board and are linked above. Rules and figures are drawn from the boards' published specifications and guidance. Specifications are revised between series, so always check the current version for your board and cohort.