Corpus
/ˈkɔːrpəs/Definition, CEFR level C1, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
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Definition
nounA large collection of written or spoken texts used for study.
Extra definitions
nounA body of research.
nounAn author's complete works.
Sentence Examples
Researchers searched a language corpus.
The corpus contains millions of words.
The study used a news corpus.
Synonyms & Antonyms
Synonyms:
None
Antonyms:
None
Word Origin & History
Borrowed from Latin corpus (“body”). Doublet of corpse, corps, and riff.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
“No one suggests that Browning intended to mean vagina when he wrote “owls and bats, / Cowls and twats,” because the context does not allow for it, nor does the greater context of the Browning corpus.”
— 2011, Patrick Spedding, James Lambert, “Fanny Hill, Lord Fanny, and the Myth of Metonymy”, in Studies in Philology, volume 108, number 1, page 113:
“A corpus approach is a useful methodology for observing, describing and interpreting the stylistic features of language in literary and non-literary texts.”
— 2014, Giuseppina Balossi, “Corpus Approaches to the Study of Language and Literature”, in A Corpus Linguistic Approach to Literary Language and Characterization: Virginia Woolf's The Waves (Linguistic Approaches to Literature; 18), Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, →ISBN, page 41:
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CEFR Practice Quiz
Researchers searched a language ____.