Full-text corpus data


You can now download the NOW corpus for offline use, including monthly updates via a subscription. In total, this is about 18.8 billion words of data that you can have on your own machine. There's nothing else like it.

The NOW corpus contains data from 32,043,723 texts from online magazines and newspapers in 20 different English-speaking countries from 2010 to the current time (see sources). At 18.8 billion words, it is by far the largest corpus (of any language) that is available in full-text format. Most importantly, the corpus grows by 4-5 million words of data each day. This translates to about 120-140 million words each month and about 1.4 - 1.6 billion words each year.  (See totals by month.) If you're interested in what's going on in English up to and including right now, this is by far the best corpus available.

When you purchase the full-text data from NOW, you get all of the data from 2010 up through the previous month. You can also purchase an annual subscription, which will give you data for the next 12 months (typically about 1.5 billion words each year).

For example, if you purchase both datasets on 15 March 2024, you would have the data from January 2010 - February 2024 (which was released on 29 February 2024; see the samples in #2 below), and an annual subscription would give you the data for one more year: March 2024 - February 2025.

    Time period Size Samples
1 One-time purchase 2010 - month of purchase (Currently) About 18.8 billion words Database, WordLemPoS, Text, Sources, Lexicon
2 Annual subscription The 12 month period after month of purchase Database, WordLemPoS, Text, Sources, Lexicon

If you purchase just #1 above, it would be the price of one corpus. If you purchase the subscription as well, there would be a discount for purchasing both corpora (#1 and #2) at the same time.

Note also that the monthly updates will be released at the beginning of the following month. You will be notified by email as soon as the update is available, and you will have ten days to download the data.