Corpus Linguistics - BNCweb - Introduction to BNCweb: The British National Corpus

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Intro to BNCweb

Introduction to the British National Corpus

The British National Corpus (BNC) is a very large corpus of present-day British English, containing 100 million words of text. It was collected in the early 1990s but many of the texts are from earlier years. It contains both written and spoken texts, as outlined in the table below.

Broad text category	Text category and description	Number of words	Closest equivalent in Brown,Frown,LOB, FLOB
Written	"informative" writing: 9 types = world affairs, leisure, arts, commerce & finance, belief & thought, social science, applied science, natural & pure science	70.1 million	Sections A-J
Written	"imaginative" writing (= fiction)	19.7 million	Sections K-R
Spoken	"spoken demographic" = informal conversation which has been demographically sampled across the population of the UK	4.2 million	none
Spoken	"spoken context governed" = speech recorded at specific locations for specific events, such as business meetings, public talks	6.2 million	none