He is known for his work compiling a text collection entitled the Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English, which he completed with Henry Kučera.

His mother attended Wellesley College and taught public school in Boston, before marrying Francis' father and moving to Philadelphia.

[2] While he officially retired at that time with the title of Emeritus Professor, he continued to teach historical and comparative linguistics and advise students.

[citation needed] After joining the faculty of Brown, Francis took a course in computational linguistics from Henry Kučera, who taught as a member of the Slavic Department staff.

Disseminated throughout the world, the Brown Corpus has served as a model for similar projects in other languages and as the basis for numerous scholarly studies, including Francis and Kučera's Frequency Analysis of English Usage, which was published in 1967.

[citation needed] In 1977, Francis cofounded the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME) at the University of Oslo.

In 1986, the newsletter recognized his work on an individual basis, while ten years later, the journal published "A Tribute to W. Nelson Francis and Henry Kučera".

[citation needed] Francis served as a keynote speaker, lecturer, and visiting professor in London; Edinburgh; Cairo; Tokyo; and Trondheim, Norway.