TheBritishNationalCorpus(BNC)isalarge,structuredcollectionofsamplesofwrittenandspokenBritishEnglishfromthelate20thcentury.Itwascreatedinthe1990sasacollaborativeprojectinvolvingacademicresearchers,publishers,andotherinstitutions.Thecorpuscontainsover100millionwords,withabout90%fromwrittentexts(books,newspapers,journals,etc.)and10%fromtranscribedspokenlanguage(conversations,lectures,broadcasts,etc.).TheBNCiscarefullybalancedacrossdifferentgenres,domains,anddemographicstorepresentawiderangeofBritishEnglishusage.Ithasbeenextensivelyusedforlinguisticresearch,lexicography,languageteaching,andnaturallanguageprocessingapplications.Thecorpusisannotatedwithpart-of-speechinformationandothermetadata,makingitvaluableforstudyinggrammar,vocabulary,andlanguagepatterns.Whilenowsomewhatdated,theBNCremainsanimportantreferenceforBritishEnglish,especiallyforhistoricalcomparisonswithmorerecentlanguagecorpora.
