corpus

American  

[kawr-puhs] / ˈkɔr pəs /

noun

• corpora,
  plural
• corpuses
  plural

1. a large or complete collection of writings.

   the entire corpus of Old English poetry.

2. the body of a person or animal, especially when dead.

3. Anatomy. a body, mass, or part having a special character or function.

4. Linguistics. a body of utterances, as words or sentences, assumed to be representative of and used for lexical, grammatical, or other linguistic analysis.

5. a principal or capital sum, as opposed to interest or income.

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corpus British  

/ ˈkɔːpəs /

noun

1. a collection or body of writings, esp by a single author or on a specific topic

   the corpus of Dickens' works

2. the main body, section, or substance of something

3. anatomy

   1. any distinct mass or body

   2. the main part of an organ or structure

4. the inner layer or layers of cells of the meristem at a shoot tip, which produces the vascular tissue and pith Compare tunica

5. linguistics a body of data, esp the finite collection of grammatical sentences of a language that a linguistic theory seeks to describe by means of an algorithm

6. a capital or principal sum, as contrasted with a derived income

7. obsolete a human or animal body, esp a dead one

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Usage

What does corpus mean? Corpus most commonly refers to a large or comprehensive collection of creative works, such as all of the writings of a particular author. An artist’s corpus is their body of work, and in fact the word corpus comes from the Latin word meaning “body.” (This Latin word appears in the well-known legal phrase habeas corpus, meaning “(you may) have the body.”)More generally, corpus is used in English to refer to the main body, section, or substance of something. The word is used in a more specific way in linguistics to refer to an entire set of a particular linguistic element within a language, such as words or sentences. It’s also used in several more specific ways in the context of anatomy in the names of body parts. The correct plural of corpus can be either corpora or corpuses. (Other Latin-derived words can be pluralized in the same way as corpora.)Example: Instead of devoting my dissertation to examining a specific theme throughout her corpus, I decided to focus on a single work.

Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• corpora
  plural
• corpuses
  plural

Etymology

Origin of corpus

First recorded in 1225–75; Middle English, from Latin

Explanation

A corpus is a collection of writings. If you tend to never throw anything away, you might have your entire school corpus, from your first scribbled words to your high school English essays. The written works of an author, or from one specific time period, can be called a corpus if they're gathered together into a collection or talked about as a group. You could discuss the corpus of Dr. Seuss, for example. Corpus sounds a little like corpse, and that's no coincidence; corpus means "body" in Latin, and though it's come to mean specifically "body of work," the two words are closely related.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

corpus corpora corpuses

California’s district judges were overrun with emergency petitions for writs of habeas corpus, a legal maneuver rarely used outside death row appeals.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 31, 2026

Stern: Habeas corpus traces back to 1215 and England’s Magna Carta.

From Slate ● Jul. 27, 2026

The day of The Times’ article publication, the public defenders office helped the family file a habeas corpus petition on behalf of Wilber.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 10, 2026

In the Supreme Court’s recently completed 2025-26 term, Alito expanded his corpus of transformative rulings.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 10, 2026

Here we're somewhere in the middle of the head with the cortex above, the corpus callosum in the middle, and the brain stem descending to the spinal column.

From "Phineas Gage" by John Fleischman

"They are trained on a corpora of books, articles and websites, even the entirety of English Wikipedia, but these texts rarely feature emoji."

From BBC ● Sep. 15, 2022

“The district court’s evaluation of corpora is fatally flawed,” they wrote — and is “opaque and unreproducible.”

From The Verge ● Jun. 7, 2022

Publishers might strike licensing deals, of course, making their text available to large firms for inclusion in their corpora.

From Scientific American ● May 4, 2022

But computers and digital corpora make this far faster today: Ben Blatt adopted these techniques for many clever experiments in “Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve”, his book from 2017.

From Economist ● Mar. 8, 2018

Dorsal to the Sylvian aqueduct is a layer called the lamina quadrigemina and on this the corpora quadrigemina rest.

From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Slice 4 "Bradford, William" to "Brequigny, Louis" by Various

Since the narrative of searching for the grail shows up in so many corpuses of data, the algorithm uses that a lot, too — the AI loves cliches.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 20, 2023

Often, these under-served languages do not have easily accessible corpuses of written text that are needed to train AI systems or sometimes have no standardized writing system at all.

From The Verge ● Feb. 23, 2022

“What makes machine learning different from regular programming is you look at corpuses of data to make guesses about things,” says Paul Lambert, a product manager for Gmail.

From New York Times ● Nov. 7, 2018

The Google Books Ngram Viewer—which resulted from the ongoing “Culturomics” project at Harvard and MIT—and other digital corpuses can detect “low-frequency words” lexicographers might be missing.

From Slate ● Jan. 12, 2015

Do ’ee happen to know, Mr Morley, ’ow it is that bald heads an’ fat corpuses a’most always go together?”

From The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands by R. M. (Robert Michael) Ballantyne