 The British National Corpus contains ample information on the dominant meanings and usage patterns for the 10,000 words that forms the core of English.The number of words in the British National Corpus (ca 100 million) is sufficient for many empirical strategies for learning about language for linguists and lexicographers, and is satisfactory for technologies that utilize quantitative information about the behavior of words as input (parsing).However, for some other purposes, it is insufficient, as an outcome of the Zipfian nature of word frequencies.