DOWNLOAD LIST OF ALL TEXTS AND SUMMARY BY YEAR, GENRE, AND SUB-GENRE (UPDATED AUGUST 2010)

The corpus is composed of more than 410 million words in more than 160,000 texts, including 20 million words each year from 1990-2010. For each year (and therefore overall, as well), the corpus is evenly divided between the five genres of spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals. The texts come from a variety of sources:

• Spoken: (85 million words) Transcripts of unscripted conversation from more than 150 different TV and radio programs (examples: All Things Considered (NPR), Newshour (PBS), Good Morning America (ABC), Today Show (NBC), 60 Minutes (CBS), Hannity and Colmes (Fox), Jerry Springer, etc). [See notes on the naturalness and authenticity of the language from these transcripts).

• Fiction: (81 million words) Short stories and plays from literary magazines, children’s magazines, popular magazines, first chapters of first edition books 1990-present, and movie scripts.

• Popular Magazines: (86 million words) Nearly 100 different magazines, with a good mix (overall, and by year) between specific domains (news, health, home and gardening, women, financial, religion, sports, etc). A few examples are Time, Men’s Health, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Fortune, Christian Century, Sports Illustrated, etc.

• Newspapers: (81 million words) Ten newspapers from across the US, including: USA Today, New York Times, Atlanta Journal Constitution, San Francisco Chronicle, etc. In most cases, there is a good mix between different sections of the newspaper, such as local news, opinion, sports, financial, etc.

• Academic Journals: (81 million words) Nearly 100 different peer-reviewed journals. These were selected to cover the entire range of the Library of Congress classification system (e.g. a certain percentage from B (philosophy, psychology, religion), D (world history), K (education), T (technology), etc.), both overall and by number of words per year

Because of copyright and licensing issues, the texts themselves are not available for download, under any circumstances. All access to the texts is via this web interface.