Historical collection of the Text Creation Partnership’s (TCP)
Early English Books Online (EEBO) – Phase I; Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO); Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans
This Sketch Engine English corpus collection consists of three publicly available parts of greater projects:
- ProQuest’s EEBO-TCP Phase I – 25 364 books from the EEBO collection from the years 1473–c.1700
- Gale Cengage’s ECCO-TCP – 2473 titles printed in the United Kingdom between the years 1701 and 1800
- Readex’s Evans-TCP – 5007 books published in America during the years 1639–1800
The previous parts also represent subcorpora in the corpus. The size of this English historical collection is more than 826 million words. This corpus compilation was annotated by TreeTagger with Penn TreeBank tagset.
The corpus searches can use criteria such as the year or century published, key terms in books, etc.
Diachronic analysis
The corpus contains time metadata which enables to build the trends feature in Sketch Engine. The trends feature analyses the frequency of the use of a word in time by comparing the frequency of use across a series of comparable time periods.
Availability
The corpus is accessible to all users with a subscription plan and site licence members (not to trial users).
Tools to work with the historical English corpus
A complete set of tools is available to work with this historical English corpus to generate:
- word sketch – English collocations categorized by grammatical relations
- thesaurus – synonyms and similar words for every word
- word lists – lists of English nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. organized by frequency
- n-grams – frequency list of multi-word units
- concordance – examples in context
- trends– diachronic analysis automatically identifies neologisms and changes in use
- keywords– terminology extraction of one-word
- text type analysis – statistics of metadata in the corpus
Search this English corpus
Sketch Engine offers a range of tools to work with this historical English corpus to study Early Modern English.
Use Sketch Engine in minutes
Generating collocations, frequency lists, examples in contexts, n-grams or extracting terms. Use our Quick Start Guide to learn it in minutes.
