corpora

Noun

corpus (plural corpora or corpuses or corpusses or (hypercorrect) corpi)

1. A collection of written or spoken texts.
   • No one suggests that Browning intended to mean vagina when he wrote “owls and bats, / Cowls and twats,” because the context does not allow for it, nor does the greater context of the Browning corpus.2011, Patrick Spedding, James Lambert, “Fanny Hill, Lord Fanny, and the Myth of Metonymy”, in Studies in Philology, volume 108, number 1, page 113
   1. (specifically) Such a collection in form of an electronic database used for linguistic analyses.
      • Text corpora are being used in most current lexicographic projects. Applied linguistic research is another field where text corpora are welcome as an inexhaustible source of empirical information, a polygon for testing various linguistic tools – spell-checkers, OCRs, machine translation systems...2007, Mihail Mihailov, Hannu Tommola, “Compiling Parallel Text Corpora: Towards Automation of Routine Procedures”, in Wolfgang Teubert, editor, Text Corpora and Multilingual Lexicography (Benjamins...
2. A structure of a special character or function in the animal body.
   • the corpus of the uterus
3. (uncommon) A collection or body of objects with similar characteristics.
   • About a hundred years ago in Germany, the publishing of corpuses of the ancient Greek coinages was started. […] The significance of those, and some other corpuses is exclusive, because they allowed an enormous amount of numismatic material kept in museum and private collections all over the world...1998, Dimitǎr Draganov, “New Coin Types of Hadrianopolis”, in Ulrike Peter, editor, Stephanos Nomismatikos: Edith Schönert-Geiss zum 65. Geburtstag (Griechisches Münzwerk), Berlin: Akademie Verlag...

   Synonyms:

   collection, bod, body, bones, flesh, carcass, likam, quarrons, soma

4. (archaic) The body of a man or animal.

See all 8 meanings of corpus