Prioritizing vocabulary for instruction is central to English for academic purposes (EAP) research. Several word lists have been created to serve different needs, with many of them being restricted to a basic classification as general, academic, and technical words. Although discipline-specific vocabulary lists are useful for particular disciplines at one end of a continuum, and more general, common core vocabulary lists are useful for a range of disciplines at the other end, this study identified multidisciplinary words that lie in the middle and could be used by disciplines at either end of the continuum. The study identified important words in corpora of research articles collected from six disciplines with regard to common disciplinary domains in the hard and soft sciences. The target words of six disciplines were compared and examined with regard to whether they occurred in only one or many disciplines. With consideration for variability of word use across disciplines in the same disciplinary domain, words in hard sciences showed higher variability than others. The findings are discussed in terms of academic word identification, selection, and use in EAP classes.