RANGE Program
RANGE is the original lexical-profiling utility developed by Alex Heatley, Paul Nation, and Averil Coxhead at Victoria University of Wellington, distributed free at https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/vocabulary-analysis-programs. It pioneered the workflow that every later profiler inherits: tokenise a text, match each token against ordered word-family lists, and report what proportion of the text falls into each list and what falls outside all of them.
What it does
RANGE counts the frequency of words across up to 32 input files at a time and records both the total frequency of each word and its range (the number of files in which it appears). For profiling, it classifies every token into one of the loaded base lists and reports per-list coverage, type counts, family counts, and an off-list residue. The companion Frequency program turns a text or text set into a ranked frequency word list, useful for building custom base lists when none of the off-the-shelf options fit.
The default list slots ship with the GSL 1st 1,000 (West, 1953), the GSL 2nd 1,000, and the Coxhead AWL, replicating the K1+K2+AWL+off-list scheme that anchored most pre-2010 vocabulary research. Users can substitute their own lists and have done so extensively, including with the BNC/COCA 14-list and 25-list series Nation later released.
Pedigree and lineage
RANGE has had several names through its development history. The Victoria University site notes it was previously called VORDS, FVORDS, and VocabProfile before settling on RANGE. The 2002 RANGE manual by Heatley, Nation, and Coxhead is the standard methodological citation, even though the underlying program predates that documentation by several years.
Every subsequent ELT profiler descends, conceptually if not codewise, from RANGE. Cobb's web VocabProfile reimplemented the algorithm for the browser. Anthony's AntWordProfiler reimplemented it as a cross-platform GUI desktop tool. The NGSL Profiler ports the routine to a different list family. RANGE itself remains the reference implementation against which novel tools are validated.
Status
The tool is a Windows desktop program of mid-1990s vintage, distributed as a small installer with the base lists in plain-text files. It runs on contemporary Windows but lacks installers for macOS or Linux, no longer receives feature updates, and handles modern Unicode-heavy texts less gracefully than current alternatives. In practice, working researchers have largely migrated to AntWordProfiler for batch desktop work and to Lextutor for ad-hoc browser checks. RANGE's current role is methodological ancestor rather than first-line tool, but it remains free, downloadable, and cited in vocabulary studies that need methodological continuity with earlier work.
References
- Heatley, A., Nation, I. S. P., & Coxhead, A. (2002). RANGE and Frequency programs [Computer software and manual]. Victoria University of Wellington. https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/vocabulary-analysis-programs
- Nation, I. S. P. (2013). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
- Nation, I. S. P. (2016). Making and Using Word Lists for Language Learning and Testing. John Benjamins.
- Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213–238. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587951