British English: A Free Online Corpus?

[Phaedrus]

Is there a free online corpus like COCA (the Corpus of Contemporary American English) but for British English?

If anyone here knows of one, I'd be very grateful if you could tell me what it is and where one can find it online.

I am currently doing some research for which corpus data about contemporary British usage is highly desirable.

Thank you!

[Tdol]

The same guy does a British one: http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/

[jutfrank]

Can you be more specific about what kind of corpus you want?

The BNC is a large (100+ million) database of spoken and written mixed-genre texts. The Hansard Corpus, on the other hand, is much more genre-specific (UK Parliamentary speeches) but contains a whopping 1.6 billion words. GoogleBooks has 34 billion.

You can find an overview on this page here.

Another great resource that I use quite frequently is this, which contains lots of genre-specific corpora.