title: NLTK Stopword List
body: <p>I have the code beneath and I am trying to apply a stop word list to list of words.  However the results still show words such as "a" and "the" which I thought would have been removed by this process.  Any ideas what has gone wrong would be great .</p>
  
  <pre><code>import nltk
  from nltk.corpus import stopwords
  
  word_list = open("xxx.y.txt", "r")
  filtered_words = [w for w in word_list if not w in stopwords.words('english')]
  print filtered_words
  </code></pre>