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The Old Bailey Corpus - Spoken English in the 18th and 19th centuries [2008-2012]

The proceedings of the Old Bailey, London's central criminal court, were published from 1674 to 1913 and constitute a large body of texts from the beginning of Late Modern English. The Proceedings contain over 200,000 trials, totalling ca. 134 million words and its verbatim passages are arguably as near as we can get to the spoken word of the period. The material thus offers the rare opportunity of analyzing everyday language in a period that has been neglected both with regard to the compilation of primary linguistic data and the description of the structure, variability, and change of English. The Old Bailey Corpus (OBC) is based on the Proceedings and documents spoken English from the 1720s onward.

Please visit the project website of the Old Bailey Corpus or the Old Bailey Proceedings Online.