Corpus

How to spell corpus

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce corpus

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does corpus mean?

1. nounA large, organised collection of written or spoken material gathered for study or analysis.

Corpus in a sentence

• The linguist built a corpus of newspaper articles to study modern slang.

• The entire corpus of the author's letters is now stored in the university archive.

Where does corpus come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is simply the Latin noun corpus, which literally meant 'body', the physical body of a person or animal. From the idea of a body as a whole, organised mass, Latin already used it figuratively for any complete collection, such as a body of laws or writings. English took the word over directly, keeping the Latin spelling intact, and by the 1700s scholars were using it for a complete set of texts or documents gathered for study. The same root sits inside everyday relatives like 'corpse', 'corporal', 'corporation', and 'corps', all of which trace back to the notion of a body. Because the ending is the original Latin -us rather than an English -us or -ous, the safest way to remember the spelling is to picture the Latin word for body unchanged.

How the word is built

• corp- (Latin corpus: body)
• -us (Latin noun ending)