The Bank of English is a collection, or corpus, of around 520 million words of written and spoken English held on computer for the study of language use. It contains a wide range of different types of writing and speech from hundreds of different sources. The material is up to date, with most of the texts dating from 1990 onwards. Although most of the sources are British, approximately 25% of our data comes from American English sources, and about 5% from other native varieties of English -- such as Australian, Canadian, and Singaporean.

Written texts come from newspapers, magazines, fiction and non-fiction books, brochures, leaflets, reports, and letters. Two-thirds of the corpus is made up of media language: newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. International, national, and local publications are included to capture a broad range of subject matter and style, and there are thousands of books and special interest magazines in The Bank of English. Informal spoken language is represented by recordings of everyday casual conversation, meetings, interviews, and discussions. Currently, about 20 million words of The Bank of English are transcriptions of spoken language of this kind.

The purpose of collecting all this valuable data on our computers was to enable the lexicographers -- the dictionary writers -- to have access to as much information as possible about each of the words being defined. The corpus, and the software we use to analyse it, helps the COBUILD team to sort through the information and gain valuable insights into the way words are actually used: their meanings, their typical grammar patterns, and the ways in which they relate to other words.

The corpus lies at the heart of each entry. As a lexicographer begins writing an entry, he or she can call up onto the computer screen all the occurrences of the word in question. These appear in the form of concordance lines, and the lines can be examined in a number of different ways to show different aspects of the word's behaviour. Many words have more than one grammatical word class and it is often helpful for the lexicographers to look at only one word class at a time. Software has been developed which allows them to do this, and so helps them to make decisions about the different senses of words, the language of the definitions, the choice of examples, and the grammatical information given. We could, of course, make statements about these things without a corpus, but having a corpus enables us to make them with confidence and accuracy. And the larger the corpus, the more confident and accurate we can be.

Examples of how words have been used form a very important part of COBUILD dictionaries. Users are often looking for an example that is similar to one that they have heard or read, or that will confirm the way they want to use the word.

This means, of course, that the examples given in a dictionary should be characteristic of the ones that users will come across. The examples given in this dictionary have been carefully chosen to show typical contexts in which the word is used. For most words and phrases, we have hundreds, or even thousands, of instances in The Bank of English, and we have selected those which show typical grammatical patterns, typical vocabulary, and typical contexts.

The majority of the examples in the dictionary are taken word for word from one of the texts in The Bank of English. Occasionally, we have made very minor changes to them, so that they are more successful as dictionary examples.

Throughout the whole dictionary, there are over 75,000 examples. This makes the dictionary a valuable resource for both students and teachers, showing how the words have been used in books, newspapers, magazines, broadcasting, and conversation. All the examples in the dictionary have been chosen with care, and contain important information about the typical patterning associated with a word. In the case of verbs, we give examples for all the main grammatical structures in which they are used. The examples are given in the same order as the patterns shown in the Extra Column. These patterns are explained in the Grammar section (see 6. Explanation of Grammatical Notations).

At COBUILD, great emphasis is placed on describing and explaining the English language accurately, through the evidence in our corpus. The Bank of English helps our dictionaries to be more effective and reliable. Our choices of representative examples, taken from the corpus, will give students and teachers information which, we believe, they will find very useful.