Ron Moe, a linguist working in Nairobi, Kenya with SIL International, began working on the list in September, 2001. He began with a list of domains developed by Roger Van Otterloo, an SIL linguist, for Kifuliiru, a Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ron Moe led two workshops in which speakers of two Bantu languages, Gikuyu of Kenya and Lugwere of Uganda, developed a list of semantic domains for their language. These three lists were combined. Moe began collecting lists of domains from other languages, looking for ideas for other domains and investigating how each list was organized. Moe also began classifying the words of English in order to ensure that all the words of English could be classified somewhere in the list. As of this date (September, 2012) over 60,000 English words and idioms have been classified, including the 20,000 most frequent words in the Corpus of Contemporary American English.

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