Is there a website where I can find a list of one thousand words of basic English?

I found quite a few hits with the search term “basic English vocabulary.” Here’s one:

https://www.vocabulary.com/lists/190098#view=notes

Charles K Ogden in the 1930’s developed a system of basic English words consisting of just 850 words, as an aid for teaching English as a second language. The idea was that those were all the words you would need to carry on a basic conversation. It was called a “system” because it had more than just vocabulary. Strictly speaking, there were more than 850 words because, for example, a given verb with all its tenses was counted only once. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English
http://www2.educ.fukushima-u.ac.jp/~ryota/word-list.html and
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Basic_English_word_list
I must say Ogden’s list is really quite clever, and if you learned all the words on that list well, I would say that you could indeed carry on a near normal conversation, and amazingly, you only need 850 words.

Randall Munroe, author of the xkcd online comic strip, has recently written the book Thing Explainer, which uses diagrams and text from the 1000 most common words in English to provide explanations of various natural and man-made things. The book has an appendix listing the 1000 most common words. I found the vocabulary limitation to be a bit gimmicky, but the book, which you can probably find in your local bookstore, is worth a browse.

I must be missing something, because I thought a dictionary would be about the best sort of reference book for this purpose, followed by a thesaurus. I’ll be glad when the penguin wakes up and weighs in on this question. I’m trying to visualize the utility of such a list, and how you would go about determining which words belong on it. Would it be through frequency of use?

Much of the dictionary consists of specialized vocabulary such as medical and scientific terms that are not in common use. An ordinary person’s everyday vocabulary is much smaller than the approximately 40–50,000 words that he or she probably knows. You can go a long way with 1000 words.

There are also lists by school grade to enable reading selections to be geared to the appropriate language level.

Not only did Randall Munroe write the Thing Explainer book using only the ten hundred most often used words*, he wrote a computer-run word checker to keep himself on point. He put that checker here so you and I can try it. You can also read about his word checker, other word checkers, and how he put his ten-hundred-word-set together here.

It’s not the same as a place for looking up and reading the words, but it is fun to use.

*of this language I am speaking

@Jeruba Thank you, that’s all I needed to know.

So these books were designed for folks wishing to constrain their written vocabulary to 1000 words? Say for example, the authors of “Dick and Jane”.