How is the Cambridge English Corpus used?

Authors, editors and lexicographers use the Cambridge English Corpus when they are working on ELT materials for Cambridge University Press. They can study the Cambridge English Corpus to find examples of how English is used and to check facts about the English language.

Courses

Authors and editors can:

• find authentic, real-life examples, which appeal to students and are relevant to their interests.
• decide which words and phrases to focus on by discovering which are the most commonly used by English speakers, e.g word families, topic-specific words and phrases.

 Skills

Writers of grammar and vocabulary books can:

• use the CEC to look at grammatical constructions.
• find out how we use phrases and groups of words.
• look at frequency of words to see which are used most commonly in different contexts.
• compare spoken and written English to find out whether a particular word or phrase is used more frequently in speech or writing.

Reference

Dictionary writers can:

• incorporate the results of corpus research into specially designed usage notes and study pages.
• monitor trends in English and see which new words are only short-lived and which are adopted into English on a more permanent basis.
• choose real-life examples to illustrate word use.

Using the corpus enables the writers of Cambridge materials and Cambridge dictionaries to portray the English language more vividly and more accurately than ever before.