This huge collection is composed of a wide range of different types of writing and speech. It contains samples of the English language from hundreds of different sources. Written texts come from newspapers, magazines, fiction and non-fiction books, brochures, leaflets, reports, letters, and so on. The spoken word is represented by transcriptions of everyday casual conversation, radio broadcasts, meetings, interviews and discussions, etc. Taken together the Bank of English provides objective evidence about the English which most people read, write, speak and hear every day of their lives.
New data is acquired continuously.
Some books are scanned using OCR software. Magazines and ephemera are keyboarded. Audio recordings of speech are transcribed directly onto computer by specialist trained staff and we work in collaboration with other universities to collect new spoken recordings and transcriptions. The corpus includes millions of words of transcribed speech from the BBC World Service radio broadcasts, and the American National Public Radio. The mix and variety of texts represented in the Bank of English is kept under constant review and new sources are introduced to maintain the balance of the material so that it reflects the mainstream of current English today.