corpus

noun

cor·pus | \ ˈkȯr-pəs

plural corpora\ ˈkȯr-p(ə-)rə

Definition of corpus

1 : the body of a human or animal especially when dead

2a : the main part or body of a bodily structure or organ the corpus of the uterus

b : the main body or corporeal substance of a thing specifically : the principal of a fund or estate as distinct from income or interest

3a : all the writings or works of a particular kind or on a particular subject especially : the complete works of an author

b : a collection or body of knowledge or evidence especially : a collection of recorded utterances used as a basis for the descriptive analysis of a language

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Examples of corpus in a Sentence

a computerized corpus of English Jane Austen's corpus is modest in number but magnificent in achievement.

Recent Examples on the Web

The classics corpus is full of meditations on the qualities that make for a good leader. — The Economist, "What would Plato make of Boris Johnson?," 22 June 2019 Certainly, the vast corpus of the Strzok-Page correspondence does reflect a unprofessional, out-of-control culture at the FBI. — Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, "The FBI Tragedy: Elites above the Law," 11 June 2019 Starting with Alice in Bed (1983), her ten books comprise a sly, illuminating corpus that seems more related to the English comic novel than to most contemporary American fiction. — The New York Review of Books, "Phillip Lopate," 17 Jan. 2019 These systems start with a massive corpus of training samples — millions or billions of images or voice recordings — which are used to train a deep neural network to spot statistical regularities. — Quanta Magazine, "Big Data’s Mathematical Mysteries," 3 Dec. 2015 Their work fits into a corpus of research on illusory body ownership, which has challenged understandings of perception and contributed to therapies like treating pain for amputees who experience phantom limb. — Steph Yin, New York Times, "In Virtual Reality, How Much Body Do You Need?," 17 May 2018 Letter by letter, the neural net, learning from its corpus, would eke out a new sentence. — Constance Grady, Vox, "Reading Roald Dahl’s Matilda as a queer classic," 6 Oct. 2018 In this approach, words and phrases are mapped onto a geometrical space known as a vector space, which captures degrees of similarity among different words in a corpus (a large collection of texts). — Ben Zimmer, The Atlantic, "How Computers Parse the Ambiguity of Everyday Language," 27 June 2018 To identify some of these, the UIUC team leveraged a corpus of audio samples from the Nationwide Speech Project. — Sean Gallagher, Ars Technica, "Researchers show Alexa “skill squatting” could hijack voice commands," 30 Aug. 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'corpus.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.