Understanding how language shapes young learners with the Oxford Children’s Corpus
Dr Rebecca Lawrence
“The Oxford Children’s Corpus is particularly unique in its size, its wide range of texts, and the fact it is constantly added to, providing us with up-to-date insights into children’s language.”
The Oxford Children’s Corpus was built by Oxford University Press’s Children’s Dictionaries and Children’s Language Data team. It’s the largest known database of children’s written language in English around the world, and contains over 500 million words written by, and for, children. It’s a growing resource with new texts added each year, which means it provides a record of children’s language over time and reflects up-to-date usage.
By analysing the corpus, we gain valuable insights into how children’s language changes over time and the influences that shape it. We use these insights to inform our children’s dictionaries and other education products, as well as ongoing research into children’s language.
I have a long-held fascination with language, from loving French and Russian at school to studying Linguistics (the science of language) for my undergraduate and Masters degrees, and then specializing in reading and language development during my PhD. I also worked in editorial positions along the way, so my current role is the perfect combination of these interests: applying insights from language analysis straight into our dictionaries, wider publishing, and language reports. I honestly find this process exciting every day, and working on the Oxford Children’s Corpus is the cherry on top!
Analysing language to understand how young people navigate the world
Most corpora contain language written by and for adults, so a children’s corpus itself is relatively rare. The Oxford Children’s Corpus is particularly unique in its size, its wide range of texts (including reading texts, school texts, internet material, and children’s own creative writing), and the fact it is constantly added to, providing us with up-to-date insights into children’s language.
And at a time when the UK National Year of Reading is highlighting the importance of reading in children’s lives, the Corpus offers a unique evidence base for understanding the language experiences that shape young readers.
One of the most valuable aspects of our Corpus is its ability to track language change in real time. As we may expect, our Corpus analysis has shown the influence of technology on children’s creative writing: for instance we saw doomscrolling appear in BBC 500 Words stories for the first time in 2025, and the frequency of AI increased by 50% compared to the previous year. However, Iibrary, librarian, and book have all seen a significant increase in stories over the last decade, while mentions of kindle have dropped off. It’s interesting to see this subtle trend towards physical books in children’s writing over time, despite the obvious influence from technology!
Every year we see brilliant examples of children’s creative writing – a few of my favourite snippets are ‘as suddenly as a British downpour’ and ‘he was as rich as a Victoria sponge’.
The Corpus doesn’t just reveal changing vocabulary, it also helps us understand how children engage with the world around them. Looking back over the words that have been chosen as the Oxford Children’s Word of the Year offers an interesting snapshot, using language as an insight into children’s view of the world. Whilst the chosen word always captures something that has been pertinent for children at that moment in time, the earlier words like minion and #hashtag are more playful. Subsequent choices like plastic, Trump, and Brexit tap into more grown-up themes, indicating how engaged children are now with world events.
Celebrating children’s language
It’s always a privilege to work on the Children’s Word of the Year campaign. It gives children a chance to reflect on the past year but also offers them an opportunity for their voices to be heard. In 2023, children chose climate change: their responses expressed a clear call to action which I found very impactful. We now announce a colloquial word of the year as well: for instance, in 2023 we saw some brilliant and varied uses of their chosen word bro. In particular, we saw that children were using it as an in-group identity marker to minimize conflict, which is a linguistic politeness strategy. It highlighted that children are attuned to the nuanced social implications that are inherent in language – and also how they can drive language change themselves.
These insights are valuable not only for research, but also for the resources we create for children and educators. The insights we gain from the Corpus don’t simply stay within reports, they directly influence the books and resources we create. Alongside a team of lexicographers, we analyse the Corpus to inform our dictionary updates, making sure our print books and digital datasets reflect up-to-date usage. For example, Corpus analysis revealed that in recent years, children are using the words petrify, phoenix, and sapphire in their creative writing more often than they used to, so we have added these words to the forthcoming edition of our Oxford Junior Illustrated Dictionary.
Supporting research into language and learning
Our dictionary data also feeds into many of our wider products and resources. These include Bond 11+ vocabulary flashcards, glossaries for the Oxford Children’s Classics, and definitions in the Ark Curriculum Mastery resources. We’ve also used corpus analysis techniques to provide language insights for the secondary Rollercoasters books – to name a few!
Beyond helping us understand language trends, the Corpus is also contributing to wider research into reading and language development. When it comes to vocabulary development, reading (anything!) is massively important: recent research from the University of Oxford using our Corpus found that written texts offer opportunities to learn words that are only rarely encountered in speech. This continues way beyond the early years of language acquisition, which is one of the reasons why supporting a child’s enthusiasm for reading as they get older is so powerful.
The Oxford Children’s Corpus continues to reveal new insights into how children understand and use language. Most recently we’ve explored the relationship between reading and emotional understanding, using corpus analysis to examine the themes and emotions children encounter through books. This is just one example of the questions the Oxford Children’s Corpus can help us answer. Later this month, we’ll be sharing more findings from our latest research exploring the relationship between reading and emotional understanding, and what this might mean for supporting children’s reading journeys.
As the National Year of Reading continues, the Oxford Children’s Corpus offers a uniquely evidence-based view of children’s voices and experiences, and reminds us that understanding children’s language is one of the most powerful ways to support their learning.
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