Word lists present an essential tool in vocabulary teaching. Compilation of specific word lists for various fields is one of the most prominent branches of research in this field at the moment. New methodological changes in word list formation have been proposed because of the appearance of the New-GSL (Brezina & Gablasova, 2013) and AVL (Gardner & Davies, 2013). The aim of this paper is twofold. The first one is to present a word list overview which would reflect how these changes have affected the field so far. The second is to serve as a methodological guide for future researchers interested in specific word list formation. The paper provides an overview of the two most significant word lists the GSL (West, 1953) and AWL (Coxhead, 2000) along with their proposed replacements, detailed information about seven specific word lists, which were published from 2013 to 2016, with a specific focus on corpus formation criteria, word selection criteria and validity and relevance testing. Contains a bibliography.