OTE was compiled using the Oxford English Corpus, a huge collection of written English amounting currently to over a billion words, held in machine-readable form and available for computational and lexicographical analysis. This body of language (or ‘corpus’) is drawn from a very diverse range of sources (from scholarly journals to internet chatrooms, via novels and newspapers) and from all parts of the English-speaking world.
The Oxford English Corpus allows lexicographers to sort and analyse thousands of examples in context and thereby see more clearly than ever before how words are actually used. The editors of this thesaurus have been able to:
The Corpus is also used to obtain the sentences and phrases given as examples of usage.