These are mainly British in origin, but content from North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other Commonwealth countries is also being included.
The majority of the texts are from written English, collected from websites, newspapers, magazines and books.
There is also a large component of spoken data using material from radio, TV and informal conversations.
[1] Copies of the corpus are held both at HarperCollins Publishers and the University of Birmingham.
The Bank of English forms part of the Collins Word Web together with the French, German and Spanish corpora.