Word and Phrase

Word and Phrase, a corpus-based resource created by Mark Davies of Brigham Young University, has been retired in Fall 2021. Its disappearance is not a complete surprise, as the site announced in 2020 that the resource would be phased out by or during 2021. The corpus had been helpful for exploring the specific ways in which writers had previously used language. It was particularly useful for investigating collocations, words that are often used together. Thank you and farewell, Word and Phrase! You will be missed.

The good news is that searching COCA in the Word search mode provides similar support for the same 60,000 words (or lemmas) covered by the Word and Phrase corpus. In some ways, COCA offers more support for those words, but (not surprisingly) if you frequently used Word and Phrase, you might notice aspects of that resource that are missing from a COCA search in Word mode.

Consider visiting the COCA resource, which Word and Phrase was derived from, and registering for that. Registration is free. Watching our fifth COCA screencast, near the bottom of the page here, will guide you to understand where and how you can access word use information (e.g., collocates, clusters of words, and sample sentences or excerpts) on the same words that were included in the Word and Phrase corpus.

Naturally, we’ve removed the Word and Phrase screencasts that were available here. But we’ll leave this page visible, because writers, students, and perhaps corpus linguists might be given a link to this page for some time to come.

Above guide and screencast tutorials developed by Rene D. Caputo
Brought to you by the Duke University Thompson Writing Program