About the BNC
The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written. [more]
Simple Search from the British Library
Type a word or phrase in the search box and press the Go button to see up to 50 random hits from the corpus.
You can search for a single word or a phrase, restrict searches by part of speech, search in parts of the corpus only, and much more. This is a link to the simple search facility hosted by the British Library.
The search result will show the total frequency in the corpus and up to 50 examples. [more information]
There are other online services offering more advanced search functions (some require user registration):
- BYU-BNC (Brigham Young University)
- BNCWeb at Lancaster University
- BNCWeb at Oxford [Oxford University users only]
- Intellitext (University of Leeds)
- Phrases in English
Please note that we cannot answer queries about using any of these services, which are all provided elsewhere!
