natcorp.ox.ac.uk
The British National Corpus is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English from the late twentieth century. The 1994 edition can be downloaded from the Oxford Text Archive, and online services such as BNCWeb at Lancaster University, which requires registration, allow users to search and explore the corpus. It was selected for use in language based research and development. The corpus is maintained by the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics at the University of Oxford.
