Expanding horizons in historical linguistics with the 400-million word Corpus of Historical American English
Abstract
The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) contains 400 million words in more than 100,000 texts which date from the 1810s to the 2000s. The corpus contains texts from fiction, popular magazines, newspapers and non-fiction books, and is balanced by genre from decade to decade. It has been carefully lemmatised and tagged for part-of-speech, and uses the same architecture as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), BYU-BNC, the TIME Corpus and other corpora. COHA allows for a wide range of research on changes in lexis, morphology, syntax, semantics, and American culture and society (as viewed through language change), in ways that are probably not possible with any text archive (e.g., Google Books) or any other corpus of historical American English.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
The 1,749 articles are from political news articles of Desai et al. (2019) from COHA covering years 1922-1986.
“Articles in this corpus are from political news articles of Desai et al. (2019) from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA, Davies (2012)) covering years 1922-1986.”
From Political Ideology and Polarization: A Multi-dimensional Approach (2022) · cites this paper as Davies, 2012
This corpus is a subset of news articles from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA).
“This corpus is a subset of news articles from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA, Davies (2012)).”
From Political Ideology and Polarization: A Multi-dimensional Approach (2022) · cites this paper as Davies (2012)
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Political Ideology and Polarization: A Multi-dimensional Approach
Sinno, B., Oviedo, B., Atwell, K., Alikhani, M., & Li, J. J. (2022) · Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies · doi:10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.17 · Cited by 12 · see citing works
“Articles in this corpus are from political news articles of Desai et al. (2019) from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA, Davies (2012)) covering years 1922-1986.”
Background
- Authors
- Davies, M.
- Affiliations
- Brigham Young University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Davies, Mark
- Venue
- Corpora
- Publisher
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published
- 2012-11
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 121-157
- ISSN
- 1749-5032 (ISSN-L)
- 1755-1676
- OpenAlex
- W2086661708
- Cited by
- 235
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 12 · 2025: 21 · 2024: 41 · 2023: 16 · 2022: 20 · 2021: 19 · 2020: 35 · 2019: 16 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 31 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 4 · 2014: 5 · 2013: 2
- FWCI
- 62.42
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Corpora (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Digital Humanities and Scholarship
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Lexicography and Language Studies
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Historical Linguistics and Language Studies
- Keywords
- Corpus of Historical American English, historical linguistics, language change, lexis, morphology (linguistics), syntax, semantics, part-of-speech tagging
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
