Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/49032
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

I recommend The [Corpus of Contemporary American English](https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/) (and for BrE its sister the [British National Corpus](https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/)). It's a very powerful tool, supporting wildcards, part of speech tagging, grouping by lemma (e.g. _dies_, _dying_, and _died_ can all be grouped with _die_), and the ability to see the context of what texts matched.

As an aside I'll note that I don't like [using Google NGrams for dialects](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=colour%3Aeng_us_2012%2Ccolour%3Aeng_gb_2012%2Ccolor%3Aeng_us_2012%2Ccolor%3Aeng_gb_2012&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccolour%3Aeng_us_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccolour%3Aeng_gb_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccolor%3Aeng_us_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccolor%3Aeng_gb_2012%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Ccolour%3Aeng_us_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccolour%3Aeng_gb_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccolor%3Aeng_us_2012%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccolor%3Aeng_gb_2012%3B%2Cc0), since they classify texts based on where they were published (and probably sometimes the classification is just wrong, as I clearly see all too often with dates), leading to a pretty big amount of error in my experience. I explain more about that [here](https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/a/10334/191178).

Original score: 4