Corpus software (Plural: corpora)
SkELL
http://skell.sketchengine.co.uk/
corpus BYU (Brigham Young University)
Sketch Engine
Ant Conc
http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software.html
What is a corpus?
A corpus is a large collection of texts in a language. When the corpus is online we can search massive amounts of text to find patterns in the ways people use the language in real life.
One example of the ways corpora have changed linguistics is in the way dictionaries are now made. Before online corpora became possible, example sentences were made up by the dictionary creators, so they were biassed towards the interests and assumptions of the dictionary writers; now they are taken from corpora, so they are based on actual data from millions of speakers.
SkELL
Sketch Engine for English Language Learners
A free online tool that lets you ask simple questions about frequency, concordance and collocation.
Frequency:
How many times does the word occur in the corpus?
How many times does the word occur for every <million> words?
Concordance:
How is the word used in sentences?
Collocation:
What words commonly occur next to (or within X places) of the word?