The Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, version 3.1

The Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, version 3.1 (CLMET3.1) has been created by Hendrik De Smet, Susanne Flach, Hans-Jürgen Diller and Jukka Tyrkkö, as an offshoot of a bigger project developing a database of text descriptors (Diller, De Smet & Tyrkkö 2011). CLMET3.1 is a principled collection of public domain texts drawn from various online archiving projects. In total, the corpus contains some 34 million words of running text. It incorporates CLMET, CLMETEV, and CLMET3.0, and has been compiled following roughly the same principles, that is:

The corpus covers the period 1710–1920, divided into three 70-year sub-periods.
The texts making up the corpus have all been written by British and Irish authors who are native speakers of English.
The corpus never contains more than three texts by the same author.
The texts within each sub-period have been written by authors born within a correspondingly restricted sub-period.

However, compared to the earlier versions, it comes with a number of important improvements (in addition to being substantially bigger):

CLMET3.1 comes with an explicit genre classification.
It is approximately genre-balanced.
It is part-of-speech tagged.
The corpus files have standardized text headers containing descriptive meta-data.
For each text, explicit information is provided on text provenance.
The corpus architecture allows subsequent expansions.
The corpus is CWB compatible.

The following table summarises the corpus make-up:

Sub-period	Number of authors	Number of texts	Number of words
1710-1780	51	88	10,480,431
1780-1850	70	99	11,285,587
1850-1920	91	146	12,620,207
TOTAL	212	333	34,386,225

The corpus covers five major genres: narrative fiction, narrative non-fiction, drama, letters and treatise, in addition to a number of unclassified texts. The genre-division per sub-period is as follows:

Genre	1710-1780	1780-1850	1850-1920
Narrative fiction	4,642,670	4,830,718	6,311,301
Narrative non-fiction	1,863,855	1,940,245	958,410
Drama	407,885	347,493	607,401
Letters	1,016,745	714,343	479,724
Treatise	1,114,521	1,692,992	1,782,124
Other	1,434,755	1,759,796	2,481,247

License and Download

CLMET3.1 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

To download the corpus, simply click here (zip-archive, 687 MB, md5sum 1be90a10316bffa33a452d8281a51a28, sha1sum 590d575ad26b3ea5c4c0866d06db028d26b03045).

References:

Diller, H., De Smet, H., Tyrkkö, J. (2011). A European database of descriptors of English electronic texts. The European English Messenger 19, 21-35.

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