Oxford English Corpus

The Oxford English Corpus is a text corpus of English language used by the makers of the Oxford English Dictionary and by Oxford University Press's language research programme. It is the largest corpus of its kind, containing over two billion words.^[1] The sources for these words are writings of all sorts, from "literary novels and specialist journals to everyday newspapers and magazines and from Hansard to the language of chatrooms, emails, and weblogs"^[2]. This may be contrasted with similar databases that sample only a specific kind of writing.

The digital version of the Oxford English Corpus is formatted in XML and usually analysed with Sketch Engine software.^[3]

Each document in the OE Corpus is accompanied by metadata naming:

• title
• author (if known; many websites make this difficult to determine reliably)
• author gender (if known)
• language type (e.g. British English, American English)
• source website
• year (+ date, if known)
• date of collection
• domain + subdomain
• document statistics (number of tokens, sentences, etc.)^[3]

See also

• Oxford English Dictionary
• Corpus of Contemporary American English
• American National Corpus
• Frequency analysis

References

1. ^ AskOxford.com: How the OED got shorter. Retrieved: 2 December 2007.
2. ^ AskOxford.com: The Oxford English Corpus. Retrieved 2 December 2007.
3. ^ ^{a b} Technical information. Retrieved June 22, 2006.

External links

• British National Corpus
• Sketch Engine website