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. 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". 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.
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.)
Famous quotes containing the words oxford, english and/or corpus:
“Christianity as an organized religion has not always had a harmonious relationship with the family. Unlike Judaism, it kept almost no rituals that took place in private homes. The esteem that monasticism and priestly celibacy enjoyed implied a denigration of marriage and parenthood.”
—Beatrice Gottlieb, U.S. historian. The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age, ch. 12, Oxford University Press (1993)
“We talked about and that has always been a puzzle to me
why American men think that success is everything
when they know that eighty percent of them are not
going to succeed more than to just keep going and why
if they are not why do they not keep on being
interested in the things that interested them when
they were college men and why American men different
from English men do not get more interesting as they
get older.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“By that bedes side ther kneleth a may,
And she wepeth both nyght and day.
And by that beddes side ther stondith a ston,
‘Corpus Christi’wretyn theron.”
—Unknown. Corpus Christi Carol (l. 11–14)