Corpus of Founding Era American English: designing a corpus for interpreting the United States Constitution

Abstract

The original meaning of words or phrases is often in dispute in Founding Era legislation, especially the US Constitution. The Corpus of Founding Era American English (cofea) accurately provides evidence for the meaning of contested terms during the Founding Era. cofea consists of 126,394 texts and over 136 million words. This corpus has been and is being used by legal researchers and interpreters in scholarly research as well as various courts, including the Supreme Court. This paper describes the motivation for the creation of cofea and describes the process of designing and collecting the corpus.