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English vocabulary - About us
The Dictionary of English Usage is compiled from a large corpus of English language. This
corpus mainly contains the texts of novels written in English or translated into English. There
are works from both English and American literature, which accounts for some of the spelling
differences (e.g. color vs. colour). There are also novels from the 19th century, occassionally
introducing obsolete spellings (e.g. to-morrow for tomorrow). In addition, the sentences in
these earlier novels are sometimes lengthy, showing that English language has undergone great
changes in the past 150 years. Despite these peculiarities, we decided to keep the examples from
these novels in because they are not part of our literary heritage but can also provide well-constructed
sentences that are hard to find in more modern works.
There are also some novels written in foreign languages, such as the works of Cervantes, Tolstoy or
Dostoyevsky. If you use the dictionary, you will notice that there are many French, Spanish and Russian
names in the example sentences. The reason to include translated works in the corpus was that
the language of literary translations is often more standard and precise than that of writings produced in
the original language.
