This paper concerns the teaching of English to learners who are studying, or will soon study, engineering and who are expected to do at least part of their studying through textbooks written in English. Such students, especially in universities in developing countries, often find themselves very poorly equipped by their secondary education for reading engineering material in English. This paper presents an original solution to the basic lexical problem: a word list for foundation engineers that (1) presupposes little lexical or grammatical knowledge, (2) can be used by learners with a low level of English, and (3) applies to all engineering disciplines. (Contains 9 tables.)