Resources for English Linguistics

Dictionaries

Oxford English Dictionary: Electronic version of the largest historical dictionary ever published. Contains the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words, with 3.5 million illustrative quotations, from across the English-speaking world from 1100 to the present. This dictionary is not free, but many libraries have subscriptions.

A Dictionary of the English Language: A free digital edition of Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary. Johnson’s was the first attempt at compiling a comprehensive dictionary of the English language. The University of Central Florida is in the process of digitizing entries. Those that have not been digitized are viewable under the “Page View” tab.

English Dialect Dictionary Online: Electronic version of Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary, which was published in six volumes from 1898–1905.

Corpora

ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers): A multi-genre corpus of British and American English covering the period 1600-1999.

Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE): A 1.9 billion word corpus with texts from twenty countries that allows online searches and downloads of full-text data.

Corpus of English Novels (CEN): a 25-million-word corpus of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century novels by British and North American novelists

Corpus of Late Modern English Prose: A corpus of informal private letters by British writers, covering the period 1861 to 1919.

Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (CLMETEV): A corpus of formal, written, British English for the period 1710–1920.

Dialect in British Fiction 1800-1836: A database for identifying and analyzing the representation of dialect in 100 novels published between 1800 and 1836.

Eighteenth-Century English Grammars (ECEG): An online database of 323 grammars written by 275 different authors between 1700 and 1800.

Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP): An online database designed for the study of eighteenth-century English phonology, which allows users to investigate the social, regional and lexical distribution of phonological variants in eighteenth-century English.

Hyper Usage Guide of English (HUGE): Database of selected usage guides from the entire history of the genre (1770–2010).

Old Bailey Corpus: A sociolinguistically, pragmatically and textually annotated corpus based on the Proceedings of the Old Bailey (published from 1674 to 1913).

Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE2): Corpus designed for the use of students and scholars of the history of English, especially the historical syntax of the language. The PPCMBE2 covers 1700–1914.

Salamanca Corpus: A digital archive of English dialect texts. Features 456 texts published between 1500 and 1950.

Seville Corpus of Northern English (SCONE): Collection of texts in Northern English from the seventh through the sixteenth century. Includes both the edition of the manuscripts and inscriptions, as well as information about the language at different linguistic levels: spelling/phonology, morphosyntax, and lexis.

Header Image:
Ben Brierley's Journal 15 Jan 1881