The BNC Sampler is a subset of the full BNC. It comprises two samples of written and spoken material of one million words each, compiled to mirror the composition of the full BNC as far as possible. The word-class annotation of the BNC Sampler texts has been carefully checked and manually corrected. The Sampler was first created at Lancaster University during the creation of the BNC. More information about the Sampler can be found in the users reference guide for the BNC Sampler: XML Edition [.pdf file]
British National Corpus is a snapshot of British English in the early 1990s.
The British National Corpus is:
The corpus is described in full in the Users Reference Guide at BNC User Reference Guide.
The BNC was originally created by an academic-industrial consortium whose original members were:
Creation of the corpus was funded by the UK Department of Trade and Industry and the Science and Engineering Research Council under grant number IED4/1/2184 (1991-1994), within the DTI/SERC Joint Framework for Information Technology. Additional funding was provided by the British Library and the British Academy.
Maintenance, distribution, and development of the corpus has been carried out at Oxford University Computing Services. There have been three major revisions of the corpus:
Encoding format: TEI XML