The Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension Sampler (ceeces)

Abstract

This data paper describes the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension Sampler (ceeces), a linguistic corpus of personal letters covering the long eighteenth century. The letters have been sampled and transcribed from various printed editions and are now openly distributed through Zenodo. The ceeces contains 2,624 letters by 200 writers, some 1.14 million words. It comes in several versions – plain text, xml, standardised-spelling, and part-of-speech tagged – with ample metadata on the correspondents and the letters, enabling the sociolinguistic study of historical English using a range of social variables including gender, age, social rank, and geographical region.