Brown Corpus

The Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English, better known as simply the Brown Corpus, is an electronic collection of text samples of American English, the first major structured corpus of varied genres. This corpus first set the bar for the scientific study of the frequency and distribution of word categories in everyday language use. Compiled by Henry Kučera and W. Nelson Francis at Brown University, in Rhode Island, it is a general language corpus containing 500 samples of English with 2000+ words each, compiled from works published in the United States in 1961, covering a wide range of styles and varieties of prose. It contained 1,014,312 words. Its construction cost the U.S. Office of Education ~$23,000 in 1963-64.