The DOI matches its Crossref record.
The 385+ million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990–2008+): Design, architecture, and linguistic insights
Abstract
The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which was released online in early 2008, is the first large and diverse corpus of American English. In this paper, we first discuss the design of the corpus — which contains more than 385 million words from 1990–2008 (20 million words each year), balanced between spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals. We also discuss the unique relational databases architecture, which allows for a wide range of queries that are not available (or are quite difficult) with other architectures and interfaces. To conclude, we consider insights from the corpus on a number of cases of genre-based variation and recent linguistic variation, including an extended analysis of phrasal verbs in contemporary American English.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Kilgarriff, A., Baisa, V., Bušta, J., Jakubíček, M., Kovář, V., Michelfeit, J., Rychlý, P., & Suchomel, V. (2014) · Lexicography · doi:10.1007/s40607-014-0009-9 · Cited by 2,105
Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English word lemmas
Brysbaert, M., Warriner, A. B., & Kuperman, V. (2014) · Behavior Research Methods · doi:10.3758/s13428-013-0403-5 · Cited by 1,821
Davies, M. (2012) · Corpora · doi:10.3366/cor.2012.0024 · Cited by 235
Self-citationOlderbak, S., Wilhelm, O., Olaru, G., Geiger, M., Brenneman, M. W., & Roberts, R. D. (2015) · Frontiers in Psychology · doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01503 · Cited by 228
Henry, M. L., Hubbard, H. I., Grasso, S. M., Dial, H. R., Beeson, P. M., Miller, B. L., & Gorno-Tempini, M. L. (2019) · Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research · doi:10.1044/2018_jslhr-l-18-0144 · Cited by 118
Metadata
- Authors
- Davies, M.
- Venue
- International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
- Publisher
- John Benjamins Publishing Company
- Published
- 2009-06-10
- Volume
- 14
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 159-190
- ISSN
- 1384-6655 (ISSN-L)
- 1569-9811
- OpenAlex
- W2044688197
- Cited by
- 608
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 114.70
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The 385+ million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990–2008+): Design, architecture, and linguistic insights. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1075/ijcl.14.2.02dav
- The paper
- Davies, M. (2009). The 385+ million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990–2008+): Design, architecture, and linguistic insights. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.14.2.02dav
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.