Publisher's Synopsis
The Canadian Oxford Dictionary project has compiled a database of over 16 million words of Canadian text from the last ten years. It has two databases: the corpus and the citation file. The corpus is a collection of full texts, like whole books, magazines, and daily newspapers, stored in their entirety. This collection is especially useful when attempting to determine how frequently common words appear or to provide evidence that one form or usage is more common than another. For example, a quick scan of the 16-million word Canadian corpus can determine the most common spelling of their one-dollar coin. Is it loonie, looney, or loony? The corpus tells us that we have eighteen examples of "loonie", one example of "looney", and two examples of "loony".;The Canadian citation file is a two-million word database that contains all the citations from the extensive reading programme. While the corpus contains whole texts, the citation file contains relatively short contexts illustrating words taken from over 8000 different sources including books, magazines, and newspapers. These are selected by readers who note uncommon words, or common words used in distinctive ways, new words or new meanings for old words, or regional words or usages. This database continues to grow at a rate of about 100,000 words a month as 25 to 30 new sources are read each month.
