The Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus (often abbreviated as LOB Corpus) was compiled in 1980s in collaboration between the University of Lancaster, the University of Oslo, and the Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities, Bergen, to provide a British counterpart to the Brown Corpus compiled by Kucera and Francis for American English in 1960s.
Its composition was designed to match the original Brown corpus in terms of its size and genres as closely as possible using documents published in the UK by British authors. Both corpora consist of 500 samples each comprising about 2000 words in the following genres:
| Label | Text category | Brown Corpus | LOB Corpus |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | Press: reportage | 44 | 44 |
| B | Press: editorial | 27 | 27 |
| C | Press: reviews | 17 | 17 |
| D | Religion | 17 | 17 |
| E | Skills, trades and hobbies | 36 | 38 |
| F | Popular lore | 48 | 44 |
| G | Belles lettres, biography, essays | 75 | 77 |
| H | Miscellaneous (documents, reports, etc) | 30 | 30 |
| J | Learned and scientific writings | 80 | 80 |
| K | General fiction | 29 | 29 |
| L | Mystery and detective fiction | 24 | 24 |
| M | Science fiction | 6 | 6 |
| N | Adventure and western fiction | 29 | 29 |
| P | Romance and love story | 29 | 29 |
| R | Humour | 9 | 9 |
| Total | 500 | 500 |
The corpus has been also tagged, i.e. part-of-speech categories have been assigned to every word.