The British and American Word Families Project: A Morphological Database
About this Database
- The BAWF Project is about developing an AI-informed resource designed to support vocabulary, morphology, and word-family instruction.
- Morphology is the study of how words are built from meaningful units, including bases, roots, prefixes, and suffixes.
- AI can make mistakes!! There will be updates and version improvements over so time—stay tuned :).
- Use it to explore English word families, compound words, basewords, roots, prefixes, suffixes, and frequency measures.
- Use the curated tab to focus on familiar (widely known) word families for teaching.
- Use the full database tabs to explore the broader lexicon, drawn from Wiktionary and large English corpora.
- Use sorting, filtering, AI prompts, dictionary links, and etymology links.
- Use the 'Action' buttons to check morphology, get more word information, alternative parses etc.
- Download the raw compressed CSV files for offline use and advanced analysis.
- This is an open project for the community, Creative Commons—you can use it, change it, and do what you want with it!
- See a dry academic article on the project here :) Green C, Hiebert EH and Coxhead A (2026) Patterns of morphology in children’s print: estimates of polymorphemic vocabulary using an innovative, AI-informed database of British and American word families. Front. Psychol. 17:1985734. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1985734
Be inspired by joyful word learning and reading — dive in and explore!
✨ Start with AI Morphology Studio
Not sure which database tab to use? Start here. Ask in plain English, build teaching word sets, generate classroom prompts, and send words to activities or word clouds.
Curated Word Family List: Frequent and Familiar Words
This curated word family list contains frequent and familiar word families that most people know and that cover much of the text children read.
The full database is for exploring all words attested in the largest current corpora. The focused database is a trimmed version that lists only word families with familiarity ratings above approximately 3.5.
Full Database: Word Families
The full database is for exploring a broad set of words attested in large current English corpora. It includes extensive morphological, root, affix, frequency, familiarity, and educational information.
Full Database: Compound Words
This section contains compound words and compound-related family statistics.
🔍 Custom Wordlist Builder
Generate specific wordlists by stacking multiple criteria. Leave fields blank to ignore them.
📚 Frequency-Banded Family List Builder
Generate BNC/COCA-style lists such as the most frequent 1k word families, baseword families, or Greek/Latin root families. The filters above still apply.
Instructions: Paste word + frequency, one per line.
✨ AI Morphology Studio
Use this guided workspace to search the BAWF database in plain English, create teaching word sets, save words, and send them into your prompt generator.
Ask BAWF
Type a classroom or research request. This local helper translates common requests into database filters.
Teaching Word Set Builder
Quick Prompt Builder
Generate a classroom-ready prompt from your word set.