Kelly is a frequency-based wordlist generated from web corpora, and translated into and compared between nine languages for identification of core vocabulary across these languages (Kilgarriff et al., 2014).
kelly has shortcomings, namely that (1) frequency statistics are collected from web texts aimed at L1 speakers of Swedish, which can be misleading since the vocabulary used for L1 speakers may differ from what beginner L2 speakers need to concentrate on; (2) the division into the CEFR levels is based on frequency and L1 text coverage, which needs explicit validation to confirm its relevance for a CEFR-based curriculum; and (3) kelly lacks some vocabulary useful in the L2 context, such as table, alphabet, toothpaste -i.e.