Abstract With the help of Young tensor technique, we enumerate the complete and independent set of effective operators up to dim-8 for the extension of the standard model with a Goldstone boson by further imposing the Adler’s zero condition in the soft momentum limit. Such basis can be reduced to describe the axion or majoron effective Lagrangian if further (symmetry) constraints are imposed. Then reformulating dark photon as combination of Goldstone boson and transverse gauge boson, the effective operators of the Goldstone boson can be extended to effective chiral Lagrangian description of the dark photon. For the first time we obtain 0 (0), 6 (44), 1 (1), 44 (356), 32 (520) operators in Goldstone effective field theory, and 9 (49), 0 (0), 108 (676), 10 (426), 1904 (40783) operators in dark photon effective field theory at the dimension 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 for one (three) generation of fermions.