English for Specific Purposes (ESP) educators often face dilemma in deciding what lexical items to teach their students. In the field of English for Nursing Purposes (ENP), there is no exception on this issue as well. Only by analyzing the nursing corpus made up of essential core textbooks that can provide better insights and guide to both nursing students and educators. This research aims to highlight the 2,000 most frequently used nursing words across the core textbooks of nursing and to profile the types of "low frequency" lexis which comprise the nursing corpus in terms of the General Service List (GSL) and Academic Word List (AWL) lexis coverage. By knowing the frequently used nursing words would further reduce students' reading deficiency if the students use the 2000-word list.