corpus
corpus — noun
1. An organised electronic collection of authentic texts or speech recordings, used
An organised electronic collection of authentic texts or speech recordings, used by language researchers to analyse word patterns and sentence structures.
The linguist used a million-word corpus of daily conversations to study how teenagers use slang.
corpus of + [type of text/speech] as a research tool
Imani built her own corpus from Taiwanese news articles to compare formal and informal vocabulary.
Dictionary editors check a corpus of billions of words before adding new terms.
Researchers at Tokyo University compiled a corpus of workplace emails to study communication patterns.
Tamar compared a corpus of British and American news articles to find spelling differences.
- database
more general term for any organised data store; 'corpus' implies language data specifically
- text collection
explicitly describes written materials; less precise than 'corpus'
- archive
stresses historical preservation rather than analytical use
文法句型
a corpus of + [text type]
用法筆記
The plural form is corpora (the standard academic plural) or sometimes corpuses. Frequently appears in the compound noun 'corpus linguistics' to name the field of study.
常見錯誤
2. The complete writings of one author, or all the works on a single topic brought
The complete writings of one author, or all the works on a single topic brought together as a set.
Shirin is writing her thesis on the complete corpus of 20th-century Irish poetry.
corpus of + [topic/genre] for collected writings on a subject
The museum published a corpus of ancient Egyptian love songs found on papyrus fragments.
The library's digital collection includes the entire corpus of Jane Austen's novels and letters.
Rodrigo's research focuses on the surviving corpus of medieval Welsh poetry.
Scholars spent decades piecing together a reliable corpus of Sappho's surviving fragments.
- oeuvre
French loanword used only for one creator's entire output; more specific than 'corpus'
- body of work
more conversational equivalent; less formal than 'corpus'
- collected works
the most transparent synonym; often used in book titles
文法句型
a corpus of + [author/genre]
用法筆記
Often used in academic literary criticism. The word 'oeuvre' is a near-synonym but is used only for a single artist's complete body of work, not for a subject-based collection.
常見錯誤
3. The central or main mass of a body organ, as opposed to its outer covering, neck
The central or main mass of a body organ, as opposed to its outer covering, neck, or other specialised regions.
In anatomy class, students learn that the corpus of the stomach produces digestive acid.
the corpus of + [organ] — the main functional region
The MRI scan showed a small cyst in the corpus of Kenji's pancreas.
Anatomy textbooks describe the corpus of the uterus as its thick central region.
Dr. Anong noted that the tumour had grown in the corpus of the patient's bladder.
The corpus callosum connects the brain's two halves using millions of nerve fibres.
文法句型
the corpus of + [organ]
corpus + [Latin anatomical term]
用法筆記
This sense appears most often in fixed anatomical compounds such as corpus callosum (the band connecting brain hemispheres), corpus luteum (a temporary gland in the ovary), and corpus cavernosum (spongy tissue in the penis). In general medical writing, the phrase 'body of the [organ]' is more common than 'corpus'.