Sometimes it’s difficult to really understand the exact sense of a word without seeing it in context. For example, the words chance, opportunity and possibility. They all have quite similar meanings but they all have particular situations in which they can be used. If you visit the British National Corpus and type the words into the search box separately, the corpus will show you 50 examples of that particular word or phrase from a range of written and spoken material in Britain. So now can you see the difference between possibility and opportunity?
Web Corp is another corpus which searches the worldwide web for the language you want to examine. Remember that there is a lot of very poor English written by native speakers on the Internet! This tool is more useful for finding informal expressions than the British National Corpus.
