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"Xaira is a text searching software originally developed at OUCS for use with the British National Corpus. This new version has been entirely re-written as a general purpose XML search engine, which will operate on any corpus of well-formed XML documents. It is however best used with TEI-conformant documents. Xaira has full Unicode support. This means you can use it to search and display text in any language, provided you have a suitable Unicode font installed on your system. At the heart of Xaira is the Xaira Object Model. This defines a range of objects and methods for representing and searching large amounts of linguistic data. The Xaira Server program implements this model. The Xaira Indexer program creates platform-independent indexes from collections of XML documents for use by the Server. Both these Xaira components can be deployed on any platform. Client programs can access a Xaira server using a close-coupled API such as that used by the Windows client (which is written in C++), or via XMLRPC or SOAP. We provide a fully-featured client for Windows, and a PHP code library which makes it easy to develop applications for the web which can talk to a Xaira server. All versions of Xaira are now distributed free of charge under the GNU General Public Licence."

This page contains some examples of how the BNC (XML edition) can be used in combination with non-corpus based activities and exercises to study the English language. The exercises are intended as illustrations of what can be done with access to the corpus. Refer to the sample search results provided or perform your own searches.