Corpora

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈkɔːpəɹə/

Definitions

1. A collection of writings, documents, or texts that forms a substantial body of knowledge in a specific field or context
2. An organized body of work that encompasses various sources or types, often used for research and analysis
3. A term indicating a complete set of materials or data collected for study and reference purposes

Etymology: "Corpora" is the plural of "corpus," and the plural is the more familiar form in scholarship, where linguists speak of building corpora of text. The singular comes straight from Latin "corpus," meaning "body," and it is a doublet of "corpse," "corps," and "riff." These four words all descend from the same Latin source but reached English by different routes, so a body of bodies in the Latin sense has split into a dead body, a military body, a body of text and a musical phrase. The shift from physical body to collection is the surprising part. A corpus in the modern sense is a gathered mass of material, whether writings, recordings or data, and the step from a literal body to an assembled body of work is what links the scholarly term to its Latin root.

Synonyms: bodies, collections, assemblages, groups, entities