Corpora compilations

Dictionaries help you to translate words from a language to another, give you an explanation of the meaning and shows you synonyms and antonyms. They are very useful tools to learn/teach languages, but sometimes when we are writing texts (especially in a foreign language), we may doubt between two or more similar words. There is when Corpora compilations become the most useful tool we can know.

Corpora are a huge language databases of written and spoken texts. The idea is to look for coincidences in those texts and allow the user to see in which context they're used.

One of these Corpora sites is the British National Corpus. As an example, at the time I've wrote this text, I had the doubt to put "especially in foreign languages" or "especially at foreign languages". By searching "especially * language" in Corpora, we can see a list of results where appears the preposition "in" but not "at".

BNC works with English language only, but there are other Corpora sites like Linguee that, in addition, shows the correct translation of the sentence, helping us to situate the meaning in their correct context.