corpus

noun

1. 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.

   A corpus approach is a useful methodology for observing, describing and interpreting the stylistic features of language in literary and non-literary texts.

   Today, computer databases and corpora infinitely increase the ease of this type of research, but the collecting process remains essentially the same.

2. 2

   A collection of written or spoken texts. 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, NLP systems, etc.

   Comparable corpora are made up of texts in different languages that may be related in various ways, but are not translations of each other. They may have nothing in common at all, or be on the same subject, of the same genre, or from the same chronological period, etc.

3. 3

   A structure of a special character or function in the animal body.

   the corpus of the uterus

4. 4

   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, to be studied and systematized.

   An assessment in 1991 proposed publication of the results of this work in three stages: […] secondly, a corpus of the Roman pottery to present the type series and to discuss the fabrics and forms recovered, […]

5. 5

   archaicThe body of a man or animal.

Forms

plural

corpora, corpuses, corpusses, corpi