The century of prose corpus: A half-million word historical data base

Abstract

The Century of Prose Corpus is a historical corpus of British English of the period 1680-1780. It has been designed to provide a resource for students of the language of that era. The COPC is diachronic and may be considered a unit in what will eventually become a series of corpora providing access to the whole of the English language from the oldest specimens to the present. This article describes and explains the various features of the COPC. © 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.