---
title: Step 1: Prerequisites for building a lexical model
---

To prepare a lexical model based on a word list, we will need a few
things:

-   Install [Keyman Developer](https://keyman.com/developer) 12.0 or greater (Windows only)
-   A list of words in your language, stored in an spreadsheet, in dictionary-making software or, other means.

> ### Note
Currently, lexical models work better with languages that use regular
spaces as word boundaries. For complex scripts such as Khmer, Thai, Lao,
etc, a pre-processing is required before getting it to work, i.e. word
segmentation has to be determined and/or configured. See the advanced
topic on making a custom [word breaker](../advanced/word-breaker).  
This will be addressed in a future
[feature](https://github.com/keymanapp/keyman/issues/5025).

Now to create a lexical model project!

[Step 2: Creating a lexical model project](step-2)