I noticed that in the English word frequency list I am using that the words thirsty, waiter, and wool do not appear. There are some words in the list that I do not think are generally all that common, though it depends on the corpus the list comes from. I have tried to find the origin of my list but haven’t yet; I think it’s buried in my “favorites” list.
A novelistic or belles-letristic word is ‘thorn’. I would put that in an Advanced Word List. What I may do in organizing my advanced vocabulary is turn to Easton’s groupings of words by thousands. I also considered using Katzner’s categories to find a place for these words. Either is cumbersome. Maybe just a flat alpha list.