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What is the Cambridge English Corpus?

It is our main research tool, designed by us and completely unique. It gives us a clear view of how the English language is currently used all around the world: how it’s spoken, how it’s written in different contexts, how it evolves and what errors Spanish people make.

Specialists in English for Spanish Speakers

Every year, more than 200,000 Spanish people take one of the Cambridge exams.

We are the only publishing house in the world with access to the information generated by these exams: what they get right, what they get wrong and how to stop those errors from occurring. We statistically analyse this extremely valuable information in order to make the most effective English teaching methods that you can find.

More about the Corpus

To find out more about the Cambridge English Corpus, view this infographic

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Do you want to learn more about the Cambridge English Corpus?
  • c683f-e

    'E' is for Extra

    One of the frequent mistakes that Spanish speakers make is adding an extra ‘e’ to words beginning with ‘s’. The most common words where this happens are: specific, spectacular, specialised.

  • corpus-because

    The curious case of 'Because'

    Analysing Cambridge exams around the world, we’ve realised there are up to 237 spelling errors when writing ‘because’! Becouse, becaus, beacuse, becuose… and many more up to 237.

  • 95895-love

    All you need is love...

    The word ‘love’ is over 7 times more frequent than the word ‘hate’.

  • 6d444-pizarraparanoticias-copy

    4 million

    Every year, over 200,000 Spanish students take a Cambridge exam. All over the world, it is 4 million per year.

  • 5c2df-20anos

    20 years

    Since 1993, Cambridge University Press has been analysing the English of Spanish speakers: how we speak it, how we write it, and the types of errors that we make.

  • 3f79f-173

    173 countries

    Apart from the English of Spanish speakers, we also analyse how English is spoken in other 173 countries.

  • a369a-elmasgrande

    The largest

    The Cambridge English Corpus is the largest English language linguistic corpus.

  • 7c5dc-MORETHAN

    1800 billion words

    In total, the Cambridge English Corpus has over 1.8 million coded words. 75 million are spoken English. 560 million are American English and 840 million, British English.

  • bd0e0-WHITCH

    Wich or Which?

    'Wich' is the most common spelling mistake for Spanish-speaking students. The correct form is 'which'.

  • a4bc4-EXAMS

    Exclusive

    Only Cambridge University Press has access to the analysis of Cambridge English exam papers.

  • 79a41-WORLD

    Around the world... in words?

    If we put all the words contained in the Corpus together and used a 12-point font, it would circle the globe more than twice.

  • 485f3-CORPUSBOOK

    A bit of reading for your spare time...

    Reading the entire Corpus would take more than eleven years if you read 24 hours a day.

  • 5a3c8-smile

    Be polite!

    Spanish speakers use the word ‘please’ twice as much as the Portuguese, but Germans are even more polite – they use it twice as much as the Spaniards.

  • b2bf5-kiss

    Kiss and tell

    Spaniards talk about kissing more than twice as much as the French, and six times as much as Germans, but Brazilians beat us – they talk about kissing twice as much as Spanish speakers!

  • 183c7-falsefriend

    False friends

    ‘Assist’ (for ‘attend’) is the most common false friend between Spanish speakers, followed by ‘actual’ (for ‘current’).

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