Search the British National Corpus online

Various online services offer the possibility to search and explore the BNC via different interfaces. Some of the most notable are listed below:

• Audio BNC - access the digital audio files from the spoken corpus
• BNCWeb at Lancaster University (registration required - sign up here)
• CQPweb at Lancaster University
• English-corpora.org (previously BYU-BNC)
• Phrases in English
• BNC1994 is also available in Sketch Engine to subscribers

Please note that we cannot answer queries about using any of these services, which are provided by other institutions. If you have a service for querying the BNC online, get in touch and we'll consider adding it to the list.

About the BNC

The British National Corpus 1994 (BNC1994) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English, both spoken and written, from the late twentieth century. [more]

Here are some of the most popular links to information about the BNC1994:

• Download the full BNC1994 from the Oxford Text Archive
• Download the BNC1994 Baby (4m word sample) from the Oxford Text Archive
• Reference Guide for the BNC1994
• BNC1994 User Licence
• Citation and references

News from the BNC

• BNC1994: a new name for the original BNC family
• A new home for the BNC at the University of Oxford
• BNC2014
• Stylesheets to transform BNC texts
• Removal of 'simple search'
• Geoffrey Leech
• BNC2014
• Withdrawal of distribution on disks
• BNC XML for download
• BNC Baby for download
• Support for the XAIRA software