LOCNESS is a corpus of native English essays made up of:

  • British pupils’ A level essays: 60,209 words
  • British university students essays: 95,695 words
  • American university students’ essays: 168,400 words

Total number of words: 324,304 words

LOCNESS is available under the following conditions:

  1. the corpus is to be used for non-commercial purposes only
  2. all publications on research partly or wholly based on the corpus should give credit to the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics (CECL), Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. A scanned copy or offprint of the publication should also be sent to <sylviane.granger@uclouvain.be>. Alternatively a paper copy can be sent to:
    Professor S. Granger
    Université catholique de Louvain
    ILC
    Place Blaise Pascal 1 bte L3.03.33
    1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
    BELGIUM
  3. no part of the corpus is to be distributed to a third party without specific authorization from CECL.The corpus can only be used by the person agreeing to the licence terms and researchers working in close collaboration with him/her or students under his/her supervision, attached to the same institution, within the framework of the research project described below.

If you are interested in the corpus and agree to the above conditions, please complete the following form. Ensure that your email address is written correctly.

The downloadable zip file includes the original LOCNESS files as distributed by the CECL as well as an additional repertory that contains a revised cleaned-up and formatted version of the corpus made available by Noam Ordan and his team.