>Band 3 contains words which occur between 0.01 and 0.1 times per million words in typical modern English usage. These words are not commonly found in general text types like novels and newspapers, but at the same time they are not overly opaque or obscure. Nouns include ebullition and merengue, and examples of adjectives are amortizable, prelapsarian, contumacious, agglutinative, quantized, argentiferous. In addition, adjectives include a marked number of very colloquial words, e.g. cutesy, dirt-cheap, teensy, badass, crackers. Verbs and adverbs diverge to opposite ends of the spectrum of use encompassed by this band. Verbs tend to be either colloquial or technical, e.g. emote, mosey, josh, recapitalize.
>Band 4 contains words which occur between 0.1 and 1.0 times per million words in typical modern English usage. Such words are marked by much greater specificity and a wider range of register, regionality, and subject domain than those found in bands 8-5. However, most words remain recognizable to English-speakers, and are likely be used unproblematically in fiction or journalism. Examples include overhang, life support, rewrite, nutshell, candlestick, rodeo, embouchure, insectivore (nouns), astrological, egregious, insolent, Jungian, combative, bipartisan, cocksure, methylated (adjectives), intern, sequester, galvanize, cull, plop, honk, skyrocket, subpoena, pee, decelerate, befuddle, umpire (verbs), productively, methodically, lazily, pleasurably, surreptitiously, unproblematically, electrostatically, al dente, satirically (adverbs).
