Corp

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A body of characters or texts that form a cohesive entity in linguistic studies or literary analysis
2. A collection of written or spoken materials used for research and educational purposes in various fields
3. An organized group of resources such as documents used for systematic investigation and language development

Etymology: "Corp" as a standalone noun meaning a collection of texts is a clipped form of "corpus," the Latin word for "body." The source here only tells us that "corp" is an alternative form of "corp.," the abbreviation for "corpus," so the rest of the story belongs to "corpus" itself. Latin "corpus" meant a physical body, living or dead, and from that sense it came to mean a body of written material, a collected whole of texts gathered together for study. The clipping is a modern habit. Scholars and linguists often shorten "corpus" to "corp" in informal or technical writing, much as they shorten other learned terms, so the noun keeps the sense of a bounded collection while dropping the Latin ending. Its use in linguistics, where a corpus is a large sample of real language for analysis, is the context where the short form is most familiar.

Synonyms: corporation, company, firm, enterprise, business