Corpora

Sometimes it is difficult to understand a group of words when they are written together, but you identify them when they are written separately. So you would need to see them in another text to check the meaning. Corpora are compilations of texts (oral or written) that offer several options of use of these expressions or collocations. For example, I have looked for the group of words “put up with” in the British National Corpus: http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/.

If you type these words in the gap you will obtain a list with examples about texts where this group of words has been used and the kind of texts: oral interview, essay school, newspaper, political law, etc. You can also see the percentage of use in any specific context in which the expression have been found. Try it!

But in this internet page you can’t see the translation of the expression or group of word, so is useful to see useful pages as http://www.linguee.es/ where you can see the translation of the expression like you would find it in a common dictionary, and several texts in English and their translation. Let’s try again with the same expression “put up with”: http://www.linguee.es/espanol-ingles?query=put+up+with&source=english