This is the legal English that television’s courtroom shows actually say, with a real line from a named episode beside every word. Seven shows in the catalogue lean on this vocabulary; the lines quoted below are taken from four of them, Suits, Suits LA, The Lincoln Lawyer and Billions.

What separates it from the other legal-English lists online is that these words were not chosen. They were counted. No lawyer, teacher or editor sat down and decided which terms belong on a page like this. The shows said what they said, every episode of them was counted, and this is what came out of the counting.

That changes what the list is good for. Each entry carries the sense these shows actually use rather than the sense a dictionary happens to print first, and the order is neither alphabetical nor by difficulty: it runs from the words that belong most strongly to this corner of television down to the ones that only lean that way. The line under each word is there as evidence, not decoration, so you can see the word doing its job before you try to use it.

It is written for people who already speak English well. If you are reading law in English, preparing for work where English is the language of the room, or simply watching these shows and following the scene without being sure of the words carrying it, this is the vocabulary that keeps coming back.

How the list was made

Nobody chose these words, and that is the whole of what separates this page from every other legal-English list online.

Wordspotting reads subtitles for a living. It counts everything television says, and then asks something narrower than what is common: which words does one corner of television lean on that the rest of it barely touches? The words that answer, and that keep answering together across the same shows, end up in one set. Nothing in the process knows what law is, or that lawyers exist.

So nobody sat down and decided a legal list ought to exist. The shows wrote it and the counting found it.

What comes out of that is spoken legal English, the language of arguing, questioning and negotiating out loud rather than the language of statutes and contracts. Those are two different vocabularies. Only one of them is ever said aloud, and which one you need depends on whether you are going to read law or be in the room while it happens.

The words

What the textbooks list and the shows do not say

The obvious way to build a list like this is to open a legal-English glossary and copy it out. We checked what that would do to a student, by putting every entry of a conventional glossary through the same counting the list above came out of.

Some of them are never said at all. Appellant is not spoken once in the entire catalogue, and neither is conveyance. Indemnity, codicil and chattel are each said a handful of times in total, across every episode of every show.

The rest are not absent so much as swamped. These shows say defendant about fifty times for every one time they say respondent, and lawsuit about sixty times for every tort. Subpoena, which no glossary leads with, comes up nearly ten times as often as injunction, which every glossary carries. A student who learns the glossary is prepared for the words that are said essentially never, and unprepared for the ones said constantly.

The reason is a split in register rather than in subject. The glossary is the vocabulary of written law: instruments, pleadings, property, the things a lawyer drafts and signs. This list is the vocabulary of a courtroom in progress: the things a lawyer says to a witness, to the other side and to a judge while something is happening in front of them. Both are real legal English and neither replaces the other, and if you are going to read contracts you will still need the first. Only one of them is spoken.

One caveat belongs here. The catalogue is American television, so solicitor and barrister are held down partly by where these shows are set, and not only because they belong to the written register.

How to actually remember them

A list read once does nothing. You will recognise most of these words tomorrow and have lost them by next month, because recognising a word is not the same as having it ready when you need it. What makes a word stay is meeting it again somewhere you were going to be anyway.

That is the practical argument for learning this vocabulary just before you watch rather than long after. Read a handful of these words tonight, then watch an episode of one of these shows, and you will hear them come back inside the hour, spoken by people you are already following and attached to a scene you will remember. That is repetition you did not have to schedule, and it is the kind that survives.

Wordspotting, the tool the counting above came out of, does that part for you: it finds the words you do not know in a show you are about to watch and teaches them to you first. If you already watch in English, learning while you do it costs you nothing extra.