This article introduces a new list of important high frequency vocabulary words for second language learners of English. Using many of the same principles employed by Michael West in the development of the original General Service List (GSL) published in 1953, the New General Service List (NGSL) was created with full access to the 1.6 billion-word Cambridge English Corpus (CEC). Based on a more contemporary corpus of English, the NGSL was generated from a carefully selected 273 million-word subsection of the CEC (more that 100 times larger than the pre-computer era 2.5 million-word corpus used to generate the initial word lists for the GSL), the NGSL offers higher coverage than the original GSL (90% vs. 84%) with fewer words (about 2800 lemmas vs. 3600). This brief introduction to the NGSL outlines the basic steps in its creation as well as providing a link to a dedicated website where the public-domain list can be both downloaded and discussed.