Getting text — Does WordSmith come with a corpus?
Most corpora are not free for me to distribute. WordSmith 4 comes with Webgetter (see Utilities | Webgetter) which helps download text from the Internet. There is also a link here to the LUCY corpus of texts by kids and students, courtesy of Geoff Sampson (Sussex). Alternatively you can easily build up your own using Internet resources. There are lots of other corpora, some of which are freely accessible, others can be purchased cheaply, and others are extremely expensive. Try a Google search on “text corpus”. Or visit newspaper web sites. Or try the Online Books page. The British National Corpus (World Edition) is £50 for a single-user licence, cheap at the price.
