What is WebCorp?

However large and up-to-date the electronic text corpora available are, there will always be aspects of the language which are too rare or too new to be evidenced in them. WebCorp is a suite of tools which allows access to the World Wide Web as a corpus - a large collection of texts from which facts about the language can be extracted.

Who can use WebCorp?

WebCorp can be used by anyone who has an interest in language and how particular words and phrases are used, especially words and phrases which are too new or too rare to appear in any dictionary or standard corpus. Since its launch, WebCorp has been used by corpus linguists, lexicographers, language teachers and learners, publishers, journalists, advertisers, and researchers in a variety of fields. Although WebCorp is designed for linguistic data search, many users have found its results format (with relevant sections of text from multiple web pages collated on one page) useful for information retrieval of the type for which standard search engines are usually used.

Please view the Terms of Use for details on the use of output from WebCorp.

Who is responsible for WebCorp?

WebCorp was created and is operated and maintained by the Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES) in the School of English at Birmingham City University.

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