The American National Corpus (ANC) project is creating a massive electronic collection of American English, including texts of all genres and transcripts of spoken data produced from 1990 onward. The ANC will provide the most comprehensive picture of American English ever created, and will serve as a resource for education, linguistic and lexicographic research, and technology development.

When completed, the ANC will contain a core corpus of at least 100 million words, comparable across genres to the British National Corpus (BNC). The corpus will also include an "opportunistic" component of potentially several hundreds of millions of words, chosen to provide both the broadest and largest selection of texts (and, where available, annotations) possible.

The file organization and encoding conventions for the OANC is the same as in the ANC Second Release. Please consult the Second Release document encoding conventions for a full description.

The OANC data is distributed with the following annotations:

All annotations were originally produced automatically using GATE's ANNIE system. Some of the texts in the OANC include manually validated sentence boundaries (the list of texts validated for sentence boundaries is here). Note that the validated sentence boundaries are not included in the ANC Second Release.