### Corpus description

- General information
- Wordcount information

#### General information

The PPCME2 text samples are based largely on the Middle English section of the Diachronic Part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (available from ICAME), with certain additions and deletions. However, the size of the samples is considerably larger. For the earliest Helsinki time period, all texts are exhaustively sampled. For later Helsinki time periods, two texts per period were expanded to 50,000 words. The remaining texts are represented by the Helsinki Corpus sample.

The main Helsinki time periods are M1-M4, each covering approximately one hundred years. In addition, texts originally written in a given period but for which the earliest manuscript is from a later period are given two digit period designations. The following is a list of all Helsinki periods as they appear in the corpus file names:

> Period designation | Composition date | Manuscript date
> --- | --- | ---
> MX1 | unknown | 1150-1250
> M1 | 1150-1250 | 1150-1250
> M2 | 1250-1350 | 1250-1350
> M23 | 1250-1350 | 1350-1420
> M24 | 1250-1350 | 1420-1500
> M3 | 1350-1420 | 1350-1420
> M34 | 1350-1420 | 1420-1500
> MX4 | unknown | 1420-1500
> M4 | 1420-1500 | 1420-1500

The current edition of the PPCME2 includes a total of roughly 1.2 million words of running text. It comprises 55 text samples, each of which is given in three forms: a text file, a part-of-speech tagged file and a parsed file. In addition, there is a file with philological and bibliographical information about each text.

#### Wordcount information

Below is a table of the number of words by Helsinki time period:

> Period | Word count
> --- | ---
> MX1 | 62,596
> M1 | 195,494
> M2 | 93,999
> M23 | 17,013
> M24 | 35,591
> M3 | 385,994
> M34 | 99,994
> MX4 | 5,168
> M4 | 260,116
> Total | 1,155,965

The wordcounts for the individual files are given in the table below. The information in the table is also contained in the file `WORDCOUNT-PPCME2` in the info directory for the PPCME2. The file contains only ASCII characters and is suitable for importing into a spreadsheet program; the record separator is the space character.

>     cmaelr3.m23          17013
>     cmaelr4.m4           11181
>     cmancriw-1.m1        48566
>     cmancriw-2.m1        15224
>     cmastro.m3            6897
>     cmayenbi.m2          45944
>     cmbenrul.m3          18221
>     cmboeth.m3           10415
>     cmbrut3.m3           49099
>     cmcapchr.m4          52716
>     cmcapser.m4           1469
>     cmcloud.m3           15599
>     cmctmeli.m3          17005
>     cmctpars.m3          30416
>     cmearlps.m2          44521
>     cmedmund.m4           3847
>     cmedthor.m34         13949
>     cmedvern.m3          12843
>     cmequato.m3           6261
>     cmfitzja.m4           5652
>     cmgaytry.m34          5238
>     cmgregor.m4          37326
>     cmhali.m1             8495
>     cmhilton.m34          4963
>     cmhorses.m3           5902
>     cminnoce.m4           4329
>     cmjulia.m1            6810
>     cmjulnor.m34          5004
>     cmkathe.m1            8699
>     cmkempe.m4           60212
>     cmkentho.m1           4048
>     cmkentse.m2           3534
>     cmlamb1.m1            6459
>     cmlambx1.mx1         20752
>     cmmalory.m4          57775
>     cmmandev.m3          49690
>     cmmarga.m1            8069
>     cmmirk.m34           57548
>     cmntest.m3           11081
>     cmorm.po.m1          50579
>     cmotest.m3           10015
>     cmpeterb.m1           6757
>     cmpolych.m3          46444
>     cmpurvey.m3          39704
>     cmreynar.m4           8850
>     cmreynes.m4           9100
>     cmrollep.m24         17960
>     cmrolltr.m24         17631
>     cmroyal.m34           6231
>     cmsawles.m1           4111
>     cmsiege.m4            7659
>     cmthorn.mx4           5168
>     cmtrinit.mx1         41844
>     cmvices1.m1          27677
>     cmvices4.m34          7061
>     cmwycser.m3          56402