COBUILD, an acronym for Collins Birmingham University International Language Database, is a British research facility set up at the
University of Birmingham
, mottoeng = Through efforts to heights
, established = 1825 – Birmingham School of Medicine and Surgery1836 – Birmingham Royal School of Medicine and Surgery1843 – Queen's College1875 – Mason Science College1898 – Mason Univers ...
in 1980 and funded by
Collins
Collins may refer to:
People Surname
Given name
* Collins O. Bright (1917–?), Sierra Leonean diplomat
* Collins Chabane (1960–2015), South African Minister of Public Service and Administration
* Collins Cheboi (born 1987), Kenyan middle- ...
publishers.
The facility was initially led by Professor
John Sinclair. The most important achievements of the COBUILD project have been the creation and analysis of an electronic
corpus
Corpus is Latin for "body". It may refer to:
Linguistics
* Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts
* Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files
* Corpus linguistics, a branch of linguistics
Music
* ...
of contemporary text, the ''Collins Corpus'', later leading to the development of the
Bank of English
The Bank of English is a representative subset of the 4.5 billion words COBUILD corpus, a collection of English texts. These are mainly British in origin, but content from North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other Commonwealth ...
, and the production of the
monolingual learner's dictionary
A monolingual learner's dictionary (MLD) is designed to meet the reference needs of people learning a foreign language. MLDs are based on the premise that language-learners should progress from a bilingual dictionary to a monolingual one as they be ...
''Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary'', again based on the study of the COBUILD corpus and first published in 1987.
The History of COBUILD
/ref>
A number of other dictionaries and grammars have also been published, all based exclusively on evidence from the Bank of English
The Bank of English is a representative subset of the 4.5 billion words COBUILD corpus, a collection of English texts. These are mainly British in origin, but content from North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other Commonwealth ...
.
References
Further reading
*
External links
COBUILD Reference
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cobuild
Online English dictionaries
Linguistic research institutes
Applied linguistics