The British National Corpus (BNC) was originally created by Oxford University press in the 1980s - early 1990s, and it contains 100 million words of text from a wide range of genres (e.g. spoken, fiction, magazines, newspapers, and academic).
The BNC is related to many other corpora of English that we have created. These corpora were formerly known as the "BYU Corpora"), and they offer unparalleled insight into variation in English.
Click on any of the links in the search form to the left for context-sensitive help, and to see the range of queries that the corpus offers. You might pay special attention to the comparisons between genres and virtual corpora, which allow you to create personalized collections of texts related to a particular area of interest.
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