British National Corpus

• Host: Oxford University Computing Services
• URL: http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk

Description: A 100 million word snapshot of British English, both spoken and written, at the end of the 20th century, containing over 4,000 text extracts selected to represent the full variety of the language.

The corpus is distributed in compressed form as a tar archive, in TEI format with an additional special-purpose index for use with the SARA retrieval program. It can be used under Unix (networked) or Windows (standalone). The DTD is TEI-conformant, with some modifications (see http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/World/HTML/compat.html for details).

Articles:

• Extensive documentation on website.
• Many published articles; see http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/archive/papers/papers.xml.
• Detailed users manual distributed with corpus in TEI, PDF, or HTML; browsable at http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/docs/userManual/.

Distribution:

• Online service at http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk.
• CDs available for purchase: see http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/getting/index.xml.

– Lou Burnard

Contact: Oxford University Computing Services, 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN UK.

Tel. +44 (0)1865 273 221

Fax +44 (0)1865 273 275

Enquiries: natcorp@oucs.ox.ac.uk Errors: bugs@natcorp.ox.ac.uk