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World English Corpus Read more about corpora on the Macmillan English Dictionary Resource Site. Frequently Asked Questions How big is the corpus? The corpus contains a total of around 220 million words of written and spoken text. What are the major components of the corpus? The World English Corpus is made up of the following:
What types of texts are included in the different corpora? Academic discourse, print and broadcast journalism, fiction, recorded conversations (including telephone calls), recorded business meetings, general non-fiction, answerphone messages, emails, legal texts, academic seminars, cultural studies texts, radio documentaries, broadcast interviews, ELT course books, text written by learners of English, including essays and examination scripts. What is the ratio of the written and spoken texts in the corpus? The ratio is about 9:1 (written:spoken). How was the corpus used in creating the dictionary? The corpus is our primary source of information about the way words behave. It forms the basis of our description of word meanings and of the way words combine with each other (syntactically and collocationally). It also provides information about frequency – of words, meanings, grammatical patterns, and collocations. And finally, it is the main source of the example sentences shown in the dictionary. What types of computer program were used to get information from the corpus? Like most dictionary publishers, we used ‘concordancing’ software to investigate word behaviour and word patterning. In addition, the MED team used new, state-of-the-art ‘lexical profiling’ software, which gives us the most detailed and most reliable information about collocations that has ever been available. For more on how information was used from the corpora, see How Essential was Written. |
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A
unique modern database of over 200 million words revealing fresh
information on how words are used and natural examples of English as it
is written and spoken now! This is the most up-to-date corpus created
from British and American written and spoken text collected from a range
of media – books, magazines, newspapers, e-mails, television and
radio; written and spoken text from learners of English; and ELT written
and spoken materials.
