DOWNLOAD LIST OF ALL TEXTS AND SUMMARY BY YEAR, GENRE, AND SUB-GENRE (XLS version)

Download file with information for each text: tokens, types, avg. word length, # nouns, # tokens

The corpus is composed of more than 425 million words (details) in more than 175,000 texts (actually 176,389), including 20 million words each year from 1990-2011. 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: (90 million words [90,065,764]) 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: (85 million words [84,965,507]) 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: (90 million words [90,292,046]) 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: (87 million words [86,670,479]) 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: (86 million words [85,791,918]) 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

YEAR SPOKEN FICTION MAGAZINE NEWSPAPER ACADEMIC TOTAL
1990 4,332,983 4,176,786 4,061,059 4,072,572 3,943,968 20,587,368
1991 4,275,641 4,152,690 4,170,022 4,075,636 4,011,142 20,685,131
1992 4,493,738 3,862,984 4,359,784 4,060,218 3,988,593 20,765,317
1993 4,449,330 3,936,880 4,318,256 4,117,294 4,109,914 20,931,674
1994 4,416,223 4,128,691 4,360,184 4,116,061 4,008,481 21,029,640
1995 4,506,463 3,925,121 4,355,396 4,086,909 3,978,437 20,852,326
1996 4,060,792 3,938,742 4,348,339 4,062,397 4,070,075 20,480,345
1997 3,874,976 3,750,256 4,330,117 4,114,733 4,378,426 20,448,508
1998 4,424,874 3,754,334 4,353,187 4,096,829 4,070,949 20,700,173
1999 4,417,997 4,130,984 4,353,229 4,079,926 3,983,704 20,965,840
2000 4,414,772 3,925,331 4,353,049 4,034,817 4,053,691 20,781,660
2001 3,987,514 3,869,790 4,262,503 4,066,589 3,924,911 20,111,307
2002 4,329,856 3,745,852 4,279,955 4,085,554 4,014,495 20,455,712
2003 4,404,978 4,094,865 4,295,543 4,022,457 4,007,927 20,825,770
2004 4,330,018 4,076,462 4,300,735 4,084,584 3,974,453 20,766,252
2005 4,396,030 4,075,210 4,328,642 4,089,168 3,890,318 20,779,368
2006 4,304,513 4,081,287 4,279,043 4,085,757 4,028,620 20,779,220
2007 3,882,586 4,028,998 4,185,161 3,975,474 4,267,452 20,339,671
2008 3,635,622 4,155,298 4,205,477 4,031,769 4,015,545 20,043,711
2009 3,969,587 4,143,814 3,855,815 3,971,607 4,144,064 20,084,887
2010 4,095,393 3,929,160 3,806,011 4,258,633 3,816,420 19,905,617
2011 1,061,878 1,081,972 1,130,539 1,081,497 1,110,333 5,466,219*
TOTAL 90,065,764 84,965,507 90,292,046 86,670,481 85,791,918 437,785,716

* The latest update for 2011 was in April 2011, and includes texts from Jan-Mar 2011.

 

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.