English-Corpora.org is a suite of the most widely used free online English-language corpora, created by linguist Mark Davies (you may know these as the former “BYU corpora”). Together they bring billions of words under one roof, spanning different varieties of English, registers, and time periods.

A few of the highlights:

• COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) — about one billion words from 1990 to 2019, balanced across genres, including spoken language.
• COHA (Corpus of Historical American English) — 475 million words, American usage from 1820 to 2019.
• NOW (News on the Web) — 25.8 billion words, updated all the way to Sept 02, 2026.
• iWeb — 14 billion words from the web.
• GloWbE (Global Web-based English) — 1.9 billion words, a cross-section of 2012-2013 English in 20 countries.
• The Wikipedia Corpus dated 2014 and many others.

So the collection covers American, British, Canadian, and global varieties, in both written and spoken sources.

What it’s good for. A corpus shows you how the language is actually used, not how a style guide says it should be. Here you can check a word’s frequency, find its collocates, see the time period or era when it was common, gauge its register and genre, and compare how usage differs across varieties and over time. That evidence is hard to beat for a translator or writer weighing two possible equivalents or wondering whether a phrase sounds current.

Access. The corpora are free to use online after you register, with limits on how many queries you can run. A paid subscription lifts those limits for heavier use, and the corpora can also be downloaded for offline work.

We’re adding this resource to the catalog because Agnieszka Olszewska, a freelance translator, kindly shared it on LinkedIn.

Click “Open resource” to explore English-Corpora.org and run your first search.