What is the BNC?
The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English from the later part of the 20th century, both spoken and written. The latest edition is the BNC XML Edition, released in 2007.
What sort of corpus is the BNC?
Monolingual: It deals with modern British English, not other languages used in Britain. However non-British English and foreign language words do occur in the corpus.
Synchronic: It covers British English of the late twentieth century, rather than the historical development which produced it.
General: It includes many different styles and varieties, and is not limited to any particular subject field, genre or register. In particular, it contains examples of both spoken and written language.
Sample: For written sources, samples of 45,000 words are taken from various parts of single-author texts. Shorter texts up to a maximum of 45,000 words, or multi-author texts such as magazines and newspapers, are included in full. Sampling allows for a wider coverage of texts within the 100 million limit, and avoids over-representing idiosyncratic texts.
Sources: NTB: British National Corpus (BNC). (2009, April 4). In BNC, British National Corpus. Retrieved 09:27, April 15, 2009, from http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/corpus/index.xml
