The OEC: Composition and structure The Oxford English Corpus is
based mainly on material collected from pages on the World Wide
Web. Some printed texts, such as academic journals, have been
used to supplement certain subject areas. The extensive use of
web pages enables us to build a corpus of unprecedented scale
and variety. The Oxford English Corpus is intended to be as
wide-ranging as possible in its representation of the English
language. Development was planned to ensure a balanced range of
material from different subject areas, regions of the world, and
types of writing. Structuring a corpus in this way produces a
panoramic view of language use in every area of human life. The
corpus is divided into 20 major subject areas, as shown below:
Each main subject area is further divided into a series of more
specific categories. For example, Sport is divided into about 40
individual sports including baseball, basketball, sailing,
soccer, etc. This makes it possible to explore the language of a
particular subje