Englicious is brought to you by the Survey of English Usage, a world-leading research unit at University College London, independently ranked as one of the world’s leading universities, and is part-funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Economic and Physical Sciences Research Council. We also received support from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at UCL and from UCL Business PLC.
The team members are Bas Aarts, Sean Wallis and Luke Pearce. Former team members are Ian Cushing, Ellen Smith-Dennis, Dan Clayton, Jill Bowie, and Seth Mehl. Artwork is courtesy of Spike Gerrell, and copyright for this is held by him. The new 'beta' web-design is by Silverdistrict.
More videos: Englicious YouTube Channel
Registered users can leave comments or suggestions on pages, add questions to a forum, or contact us using the form on the website.
Englicious is a community-driven project. Feedback from teachers is particularly welcome and helps us improve the site.
Englicious has a new powerful search screen. Click on the Resources button at the top of the page to see it.
Every restriction you specify is shown as a 'tag' at the top of the display. The list of resources are filtered by these tags.
Click on the tag, clear the search or menu to remove the filter.
The page should update automatically (if your internet connection is slow, please be patient).
Change the sequence order with the 'sort by' control. Scroll down to see more resources. Englicious loads new resources to the bottom of the page automatically.
Content types, which are colour-coded, are as follows:
Englicious contains a lot of information that we hope will be helpful to teachers.
There are also many additional explanatory pages found under the Content type menu on the left.
Grammarianism - A Blog for Teachers of English (Bas Aarts)
Slang Lexicographer - A Blog about Slang (Jonathon Green)
Separated by a Common Language - Observations on British and American English by an American Linguist in the UK (Lynne Murphy)
The Language Log - A General Blog about Language (Various authors)
Language: A Feminist Guide (Deborah Cameron)
Lingua Franca - Language and Writing in Academe (Various authors)
Johnson - Language Column at the Economist (Robert Lane Greene)
EngLangBlog - A Blog for A-Level English Language Students and Teachers (Dan Clayton)
English Language Teaching Resources Archive at Queen Mary, University of London
A-level English Language Resources at Lancaster University
Sounds Familiar at the British Library
Corpus For Learning resources
Aarts, B., S. Chalker and E. Weiner (2014) (2nd edition) Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Crystal, D. (2008) (6th edition) A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Crystal, D. (2006) Words, Words, Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Leech, G. (2006) A Glossary of English Grammar. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Leech, G., B. Cruickshank and R. Ivanic (2001) (2nd edition) An A-Z of English Grammar and Usage. London: Longman.
Peters, P. (2013) The Cambridge Dictionary of English Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Swan, M. (2005) (3rd edition) Practical English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Trask, R. L. (1999) (2nd edition) Language: The Basics. London: Routledge.
Trask, R. L. (2000) The Penguin Dictionary of English Grammar. London: Penguin.
Trask, R. L. (2007) (2nd edition) Language and Linguistics: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge (ed. Peter Stockwell).
Asher, R. E. (ed.) (1993) The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Bright, W. (ed.) (1992) International Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brown, K. (ed.) (2006) The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Elsevier.
Collinge, N. E. (ed.) (1989) An Encyclopedia of Language. London: Routledge.
Crystal, D. (2010) (3rd edition) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Crystal, D. (2003) (2nd edition) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McArthur, T., J. Lam-McArthur and L. Fontaine (eds.) (2018) (2nd edition) The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McArthur, T. (ed.) (2005) The Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language (with Roshan McArthur). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Aarts, B. (2011) Oxford Modern English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Aarts, B. (2011) English Grammar: All You Need to Know. (This is a concise version of the item above, available on Amazon only.)
Aarts, F. and J. Aarts (1982) English Syntactic Structures: Functions and Categories in Sentence Analysis. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Aarts, B., A. McMahon and L. Hinrichs (eds.)(2021)(second edition) The Handbook of English Linguistics. Hoboken NJ and Chichester: Wiley Publishers.
Aarts, B., J. Bowie and G. Popova (eds.) (2020) The Oxford Handbook of English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad and E. Finegan (1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.
Biber, D., S. Conrad and G. Leech (2002) Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.
Crystal, D. (2006) The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate Shot and Left. (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Crystal, D. (2017) Making Sense: The Glamorous Story of English Grammar. London: Profile Books.
Culpeper, J., F. Katamba, P. Kerswill, R. Wodak and T. McEnery (2018) (eds) (2nd edition) English Language: Description, Variation and Context. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Greenbaum, S. and R. Quirk (1990) A Student’s Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. (This is a condensed version of Quirk et al. 1985.)
Huddleston, R. (1984) Introduction to the Grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Huddleston, R. and G. K. Pullum et al. (2002) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Huddleston, R. and G. K. Pullum (2022) (2nd edition) A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (This book is based on Huddleston and Pullum et al. 2002.)
Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech and J. Svartvik (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
Traditional grammars have relied on ‘made-up’ examples. Englicious is different.
Instead of example sentences like
we have examples like
Our examples come from natural language corpora. They have been spoken or written by real people. Grammar is the study of the structure of actual English or it is nothing!
Often examples are selected and presented in real time using our ICEBox database technology. This technology is also part of our ICECUP software supplied to academic linguists.
You can see this in operation. If you reload this page you will see different examples.
The advantages are immediately apparent. Most obviously, we can obtain as many ‘real’ examples as we like to aid classroom discussion. Let's look at some examples.
Note: Codes of the form [S1A-001 #1] specify the text (S1A-001) and sentence unit (#1) in ICE-GB. Spoken texts have codes starting with S, while written texts have codes starting with W.
We also use examples in some dynamic exercises, so you can also have as many revision exercises as you like.
Grammatical concepts can seem very abstract. Stereotypical examples of nouns (cat, mat, etc.) are not much help to students when real uses may be ‘messy’ and far from stereotypical, as we have seen.
This observation informs our approach. We believe it is necessary for students to apply grammatical concepts to real sentences in order to learn them properly. Thankfully, thanks to our corpus resources we have very many real sentences to use.
Ultimately we want students to be able to apply what they have learned to their own language, not just stereotypical sentences they never say or write!
That said, there are many times when simply taking random examples of real language is not ideal for teaching purposes. Examples may be too complex or contain words that are inappropriate, particularly for younger children. And teachers often want to focus on simple structures for sound pedagogical reasons.
So in fact, Englicious contains a variety of types of example.
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