Corpus

Research

A large, organized collection of texts or data assembled for systematic research analysis.

Sources

1. Merriam-Webster — corpus merriam-webster.com accessed 23 September 2026

The sense used in research is Merriam-Webster’s 3b: “a collection or body of knowledge or evidence; especially: a collection of recorded utterances used as a basis for the descriptive analysis of a language”, alongside 3a, “all the writings or works of a particular kind or on a particular subject”. From Latin corpus, “body, entity, group of people, collection, compendium”; plural corpora; first recorded in the fifteenth century in the older, bodily sense. The linguistic sense is a metaphor that has hardened into a technical term.

Merriam-Webster is cited as the dictionary of record: where an entry defines a word rather than a position, a dictionary is the primary source for it. The research usage described above is this lexicon’s own reading.

Related terms

• Abbreviation
• Abstract
• Abstraction
• Academic Database
• Analysis
• Annotation

Also defined as

A large, organized collection of texts assembled with a purpose and sampling logic, used to study language patterns at scale.

From the AJG lexicon archive (July 2026).