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The 385+ million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990–2008+): Design, architecture, and linguistic insights

Davies, Mark·2009·International Journal of Corpus Linguistics

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.

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Metadata

Authors
Davies, M.
Venue
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
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

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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
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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

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