About the Collins Corpus and the Bank of English™ The Collins corpus is a 2.5-billion word analytical database of English. It contains written material from websites, newspapers, magazines and books published around the world, and spoken material from radio, TV and everyday conversations. New data is fed into the corpus every month, to help the Collins dictionary editors identify new words and meanings from the moment they are first used. The Bank of English™ forms part of the Collins Corpus. It contains 650 million words from a carefully chosen selection of sources, to give a balanced and accurate reflection of English as it is used everyday. All cobuild dictionaries are based on the information we find on the Bank of English™ and the Collins corpus. When a dictionary editor wants to add a new word to cobuild, they search the corpus for every example of the word.
The corpus lies at the heart of cobuild and you can be confident that cobuild will show you what you need to know to be able to communicate easily and accurately in English. [bnc] British National Corpus. The Sketch Engine: Text Corpus Query System for All. COCA 01: Introduction to Using the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) Tim Johns' page.