This list represents the original list of 200 items by Swadesh which was ranked by comparing the amount of cognate pairs found in 39 Indo-European languages, with items of low ranks representing items which have a high amount of cognate pairs when comparing all languages in a pairwise fashion. The author gives also a ranked list for Malayo-Polynesian languages. Since the majority of languages was taken from Buck 1949, and the author had problems in covering all meanings of the 200 item list, the list was reduced to 154 items. Of the 154 items, however, only 153 appear in the ranking, due to a typesetting error with a missing concept for rank 133.