Italian is one of the many languages whose text corpora are included in Sketch Engine, a tool for discovering how language works. Sketch Engine is designed for linguists, lexicologists, lexicographers, researchers, translators, terminologists, teachers and students working with Italian to easily discover what is typical and frequent in the language and to notice phenomena which would go unnoticed without a large sample of Italian text.

Sketch Engine has tools to identify and analyse collocations, synonyms and antonyms, examples of use in context, keywords or terms. Frequency word lists of Italian single-word or multi-word expressions of various types can be generated. Even users without any technical knowledge can create their own Italian corpus using the Sketch Engine's intuitive built-in tool.

Tools to work with Italian text corpora

To work with the Italian language, Sketch Engine offers the following tools:

Italian Word Sketch

Word Sketch is the easiest way to get an at-a-glance overview of a word’s behaviour. Collocations are displayed in categorized lists to identify strong and weak collocates easily. more»

Available Word Sketches for user corpora: Full-featured Sketch grammar.

Word Sketch difference will compare two word sketches and will indicate which collocates tend to combine with one word or the other. The information can be used to avoid mistakes in word choice or to study the differences between two words with a similar meaning. more»

Italian concordance

The concordancer included in Sketch Engine can be used to display a list of examples (called concordance) of the search word or phrase as it appears in Italian language text corpora. The search will display the keyword with some context to the right and context to the left of the keyword (KWIC concordance). more»

Italian term extraction

Terminology extraction is a feature of Sketch Engine which automatically identifies single-word and multi-word terms in a subject-specific Italian text by comparing it to a general Italian corpus. The tool is aimed at translators, terminologists, ESP teachers and anyone who needs to deal with domain texts. The screen with results includes links to example sentences and Wikipedia definitions. more»

Bilingual term extraction

Parallel corpora are used to extract terms in two languages simultaneously and display a terminology list with translations into the other language. more»

Italian thesaurus

The thesaurus is a feature that automatically generates a list of words similar in meaning to the keyword. more»

Italian word lists

The word list feature will generate a frequency list of all words that appear in a text or corpus. A very large corpus can be used to generate a list of all words that exist in Italian or all words that start, contain or end with specific characters. Advanced options can be used to generate lists of grammatical categories or parts of speech used in a corpus together with their frequencies. more»

N-grams in Italian

Generating a list of N-grams contained in a text makes it possible to identify and study patterns and notice phenomena related to multi-word units (MWU) in Italian that cannot be detected by other tools. more»

List of available Italian corpora

  • trial – available to both trial users as well as paying subscribers
  • main – only available to paying subscribers
  • on demand – access to the corpus is subject to specific terms, click the corpus name for details
CorpusAccess policySize in words
Araneum Italicum Maius (Italian, 14.12) 1,20 G main 890,568,531
CHILDES Italian Corpus main 459,881
DGT-Translation Memory parallel – Italian main 53,260,912
ELEXIS Italian Web 2020 main 1,020,349,212
ELEXIS Italian Web 2020 (itTenTen20) WSD sample main 1,996,623
EUR-Lex 2/2016 parallel – Italian trial 606,070,097
EUR-Lex judgments 12/2016 parallel – Italian trial 42,053,315
Europarl spoken parallel – Italian trial 52,871,060
Gutenberg Italian 2020 main 93,049,296
Italian Corpus for SkELL 1.0 main 328,270,600
Italian Drama Corpus main 1,669,717
Italian parliamentary debates (ParlaMint 2.1) trial 26,549,927
Italian parliamentary debates (ParlaMint 2.1, CoNLL format) trial 26,571,966
Italian Trends (2014–today) trial 8,899,799,129
Italian Web 2006 (itWaC) main 1,597,295,469
Italian Web 2010 (itTenTen) main 2,588,873,046
Italian Web 2016 (itTenTen16) main 4,989,729,171
Italian Web 2020 (itTenTen20) trial 12,451,734,885
itWAC (reduced) main 751,542,948
Merlin Written Learner Italian main 107,797
Open Parallel Corpus (OPUS) – Italian main 180,532,849
OpenSubtitles 2018 parallel – Italian main 431,415,848
Paisa main 221,989,288
ParlaTalk Italy parliamentary debates (lower house) trial 7,656,348
ParlaTalk Italy parliamentary debates (upper house) trial 13,308,453
Timestamped JSI web corpus 2021-03 Italian main 365,307,999
Timestamped JSI web corpus 2021-04 Italian main 261,813,779