What is the Top Media Vocabulary (TMV)?
The TMV is a list of approximately 2600 Arabic words that can be considered the most frequent words in Arabic media texts. These words comprise about 95% of the content of normal news reports, by which we mean factual reports and political news, but not background articles, analyses, interviews or columns. The TMV does not contain function words like pronouns, prepositions, etc. It consists of verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs.
These 2600 words were selected from a frequency list containing 5000 words, made by Dilworth Parkinson and Tim Buckwalter. From these 5000 words I have selected the words you will encounter frequently in news reports in written or spoken form.
The TMV is a project under construction. In the future it will be expanded with additional information.
You can consult this web page on a regular basis to verify new developments or you can send an email to ReadingArabicMedia at gmail dot com to receive updates.
At an advanced stage of development is a collection of sentences which illustrate the use of the 2600 words. These sentences use only the TMV words – no other words occur. Also under development is an online tool for learning and memorising the words used in the sentences.
Using the TMV
Anyone wishing to read Arabic media texts or listen to Arabic news programs would benefit by memorising as much of the TMV as possible. This would avoid the time-consuming and tedious task of repeatedly consulting a printed or online dictionary (which may not be easily available if you are reading Arabic media on paper, or listening to media broadcasts). The TMV words cover around 95% of all vocabulary used in general media coverage.
To illustrate this coverage: the text above is an authentic text retrieved from Al Ahram and is 100% covered by the TMV.
If you have not yet internalised the TMV when you start reading Arabic Media texts, I advise you to use the online edition of the Oxford Arabic Dictionary or an extension or plug-in like 'Arabic Dictionary' for Chrome. It performs much better than Google Translate in looking up isolated words. This plug-in or extension is available for different browsers. In the image below you can see how this extension works. The popup appears when you move the mouse over a word. The word becomes highlighted.
To help you memorise the words of the TMV I have created a group of courses in the online vocabulary training platform Memrise. This tool consists of a group of 5 courses (grouped together in the group Top Media Arabic Vocabulary 2600 words) containing all words of the Top Media Vocabulary, a list of 2560 words as described above.
This link will lead you to the first course.
The TMV in its present form only contains basic information on words:
Arabic spelling, root, morphological information, English (or Dutch) translation.
Some words represent two separate records in the list, providing two different senses of the word.
Additional information about these words (different senses, collocations and multi-word expressions) can be found in a recent dictionary of Modern Standard Arabic like the Oxford Arabic Dictionary or the Bulaaq Arabic-Dutch dictionary.
The current TMV is available in three different versions, one sorted by the Arabic root, another sorted by frequency and a third sorted alphabetically by the Arabic word. These versions are available as an Arabic-English list or an Arabic-Dutch list. These are pdf files and you can download them here.
NEW: June 2025: TMV directly accessible through MATC
A new function has been added to MATC, with one click you can call up a page with the reference list of 2600 words (TMV).
How to access the TMV? If you are reading a text in MATC and you come across a word of which you do not know the meaning (but there is no gloss given for that word on the VocabularyInfo or Vocab/Syntax tab), you can look up that word in the TMV lookup list.
How do you do that? You click on the orange TMV button. In the search window (Search) you type the word you are looking for.
What information do you get then? You get 5 columns: Group (1-26 groups with 100 words, the lower the number of the group, the higher the frequency of the word), English meaning of the word, the Arabic word, the root of the word, an indication of the part of speech (more information about this can be found below).
How to return to your text? If you click the Back button you will return to the About tab of the text you were reading. If you click the back arrow of your browser you will return directloy to the text you were reading and to the position in the text where you were.
Abbreviations used for the part of speech information:
4a, 8a etc.: verb stem IV, verb stem VIII etc.
4m, 8m etc: masdar stem IV, masdar stem VIII etc.
1pa, 4 pa etc.: active participle stem I, stem IV etc.
1pp, 4 pp etc.: passive participle stem I, stem IV etc.
adj = adjective
elat = elative (akbar etc.)
n = noun
n./adj = noun and adjective
n.coll = collective noun
