English Language Dictionaries, Corpora & Other Resources: Linguistic Corpora

The BNC is a very large (over 100 million words) corpus of modern English, both spoken and written, designed to represent as wide a range of modern British English as possible. The written part (90%) includes, for example, extracts from regional and national newspapers, specialist periodicals and journals for all ages and interests, academic books and popular fiction, published and unpublished letters and memoranda, and school and university essays. The spoken part (10%) includes a large amount of unscripted informal conversation, recorded by volunteers selected from different age, region and social classes in a demographically balanced way, together with spoken language collected in all kinds of different contexts, ranging from formal business or government meetings to radio shows and phone-ins. While we do not presently have access to the full corpus, you can do simply searches on-line, which will provide results of up to 50 hits.

"The COCA is the largest publicly-available corpus of English, and the only genre-balanced corpus of American English. The corpus contains more than 400 million words of text and is equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts. It includes 20 million words each year from 1990-2009, and the corpus is also updated every six to nine months. Because of its design, it is perhaps the only corpus of English that is suitable for looking at current, ongoing changes in the language. The interface allows you to search for exact words or phrases, wildcards, lemmas, part of speech, or any combination of these. You can search for surrounding words (collocates) within a ten-word window (e.g. all nouns somewhere near faint, all adjectives near woman, or all verbs near feelings), which often gives you good insight into the meaning and use of a word."

An on-line, searchable part of a collection of transcripts of academic speech events recorded at the University of Michigan. There are currently 152 transcripts (totaling 1,848,364 words) available at this site.

These corpora were created by Mark Davies, Professor of Linguistics at Brigham Young University. They have many different uses, including: finding out how native speakers actually speak and write; looking at language variation and change; finding the frequency of words, phrases, and collocates; and designing authentic language teaching materials and resources.

"A discovery service that collates and provides access to assorted examples of Australian English text (published and unpublished), transcriptions, audio and audio-visual materials."

The University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) provides free access to a large range of electronic text collections. The text of these collections may be searched for the use/instance of particular words or phrases, using a variety of searching techniques. Be sure to look at the search tips to maximize search efficiency.

The Oxford Text Archive holds several thousand electronic texts and linguistic corpora, in a variety of languages. Its holdings include electronic editions of works by individual authors, standard reference works such as the Bible and mono-/bilingual dictionaries, and a range of language corpora.

Full-text back issues of hundreds of scholarly journals in all disciplines, some of which date back to the 1800's. Content in JSTOR may be searched by individual issue or as a whole collection.

Statistical natural language processing and corpus-based computational linguistics: An annotated list of resources. Chris Manning, Stanford University

Additional resources for the study of English. Anne Curzan. U of Michigan.

Compare the use of two different terms of phrases on the web.

For data-driven language learning on the Web. U of Quebec