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corpus

UK/ˈkɔːpəs/US/ˈkɔɹpəs/
nounC2Common in everyday speech and writing · #6,826 of 15,258leans written

A corpus is a large collected body of writing or of data. A corpus of texts, the corpus of his work, a language corpus.

In linguistics it is a searchable collection of real language used to find out how words are actually used rather than how anybody thinks they are, and dictionaries have been built on them since the 1980s. The plural is corpora.

Definitions of corpus

  1. 1nouncorpusA large collected body of writing or of data.C2

    “The researchers built a corpus of newspaper articles to study how English is changing.”

corpus is a collection.

Remember it

COR-pus → a COPY

One copy of every book the press ever printed, stacked from the floor to the ceiling of a single room. The whole stack together is the thing being studied, not any one book in it.

hooks ontocopy

Where it comes from

Latin corpus means a body. Corpse and corps are the same word taken into English by other routes.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *krep-

  2. Latin

    corpus — body

  3. English, today

    corpus

Latin corpus (“body”). a doublet of corpse and corps and riff#Etymology 2.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

corpus in the wild

  • The right to petition for a writ of habeas corpus has long been celebrated as a fundamental safeguard of individual liberty.

    Habeas corpus

  • Habeas corpus is generally enforced via writ, and accordingly referred to as a writ of habeas corpus.

    Habeas corpus

  • The text-corpus method uses the body of texts in any natural language to derive the set of abstract rules which govern that language.

    Corpus linguistics

  • Abraham Lincoln signed the bill into law on March 3, 1863, and suspended habeas corpus under the authority it granted him six months later.

    Habeas Corpus Suspension Act (1863)

  • The Habeas Corpus Act of 1867 is an act of Congress that significantly expanded the jurisdiction of federal courts to issue writs of habeas corpus.

    Habeas Corpus Act of 1867

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the corpus family

corpscorpse

corpus — used about once every 2,202 pages · #6,826 · point at the bar for the others

  • corporate
  • corporation