The corpus contains more than 385 million words of text, including 20 million words each year from 1990-2008, and it is equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts. (The most recent texts are from late 2008). The corpus will also be updated every six to nine months from this point on, and will therefore serve as a unique record of linguistic changes in American English.

The BNC contains 100 million words from the UK, 1980s-1993.