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:
“I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all ... like an opera.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“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)