British National Corpus 1.0

Abstract

British National Corpus is a snapshot of British English in the early 1990s. This is the first version of the corpus, released in 1995, and now superceded by the BNC XML corpus. The British National Corpus is:

a sample corpus: composed of text samples generally no longer than 45,000 words. a synchronic corpus: the corpus includes imaginative texts from 1960, informative texts from 1975. a general corpus: not specifically restricted to any particular subject field, register or genre. a monolingual British English corpus: it comprises text samples which are substantially the product of speakers of British English. a mixed corpus: it contains examples of both spoken and written language.

The corpus is described in full in the Users Reference Guide at http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/docs/URG/.