The
Oxford English Corpus is a
text corpus of 21st century
English, used by the makers of the
Oxford English Dictionary and by
Oxford University Press's language research programme. It is the largest corpus of its kind, containing nearly 2.5
billion words. It includes language from the UK, the United States, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, Canada, India, Singapore and South Africa. The text is mainly collected from
web pages; some printed texts, such as academic journals, have been collected to supplement particular subject areas. The sources are writings of all sorts, from "literary novels and specialist journals to everyday newspapers and magazines and from
Hansard to the language of blogs, emails, and social media". This may be contrasted with similar databases that sample only a specific kind of writing. The corpus is generally available only to researchers at Oxford University Press, but other researchers who can demonstrate a strong need may apply for access.