German is one of the many languages whose text corpora are included in Sketch Engine, a tool for discovering how language works. Sketch Engine is designed for linguists, lexicologists, lexicographers, researchers, translators, terminologists, teachers and students working with German to easily discover what is typical and frequent in the language and to notice phenomena which would go unnoticed without a large sample of German text.

Sketch Engine has tools to identify and analyse collocations, synonyms and antonyms, examples of use in context, keywords or terms. Frequency word lists of German single-word or multi-word expressions of various types can be generated. Even users without any technical knowledge can create their own German corpus using the Sketch Engine's intuitive built-in tool.

Tools to work with German text corpora

To work with the German language, Sketch Engine offers the following tools:

German Word Sketch

Word Sketch is the easiest way to get an at-a-glance overview of a word’s behaviour. Collocations are displayed in categorized lists to identify strong and weak collocates easily. more»

Available Word Sketches for user corpora: Full-featured Sketch grammar.

Word Sketch difference will compare two word sketches and will indicate which collocates tend to combine with one word or the other. The information can be used to avoid mistakes in word choice or to study the differences between two words with a similar meaning. more»

German concordance

The concordancer included in Sketch Engine can be used to display a list of examples (called concordance) of the search word or phrase as it appears in German language text corpora. The search will display the keyword with some context to the right and context to the left of the keyword (KWIC concordance). more»

German term extraction

Terminology extraction is a feature of Sketch Engine which automatically identifies single-word and multi-word terms in a subject-specific German text by comparing it to a general German corpus. The tool is aimed at translators, terminologists, ESP teachers and anyone who needs to deal with domain texts. The screen with results includes links to example sentences and Wikipedia definitions. more»

Bilingual term extraction

Parallel corpora are used to extract terms in two languages simultaneously and display a terminology list with translations into the other language. more»

German thesaurus

The thesaurus is a feature that automatically generates a list of words similar in meaning to the keyword. more»

German word lists

The word list feature will generate a frequency list of all words that appear in a text or corpus. A very large corpus can be used to generate a list of all words that exist in German or all words that start, contain or end with specific characters. Advanced options can be used to generate lists of grammatical categories or parts of speech used in a corpus together with their frequencies. more»

N-grams in German

Generating a list of N-grams contained in a text makes it possible to identify and study patterns and notice phenomena related to multi-word units (MWU) in German that cannot be detected by other tools. more»

List of available German corpora

  • trial – available to both trial users as well as paying subscribers
  • main – only available to paying subscribers
  • on demand – access to the corpus is subject to specific terms, click the corpus name for details
CorpusAccess policySize in words
Alsatian Drama Corpus main 276,204
Araneum Germanicum Maius [2013] main 875,465,845
CHILDES German Corpus main 5,941,266
DGT-Translation Memory parallel – German main 45,380,666
ELEXIS German Web 2020 main 1,023,830,342
ELEXIS German Web 2020 (deTenTen20) WSD sample main 1,998,166
EUR-Lex 2/2016 parallel – German trial 528,617,843
EUR-Lex judgments 12/2016 parallel – German trial 35,297,517
Europarl spoken parallel – German trial 47,805,055
German Corpus for SkELL 1.0 main 769,810,745
German Drama Corpus main 9,374,314
German Political Speeches Corpus trial 11,144,258
German Trends trial 896,194,806
German Web 2010 main 2,338,036,362
German Web 2010 (deWaC) main 1,348,188,416
German Web 2013 (deTenTen13) main 16,526,335,416
German Web 2018 (deTenTen18) main 5,346,041,196
German Web 2020 (deTenTen20) trial 17,512,733,172
GerManC (German Newspapers 1650-1800) main 667,310
Gutenberg German 2020 main 74,709,930
Merlin Written Learner German main 150,256
Open Parallel Corpus (OPUS) – German main 125,229,773
OpenSubtitles 2018 parallel – German main 185,133,927
Parsed German Web (sDeWaC) main 755,165,551
Shakespeare German Drama Corpus main 796,439
Timestamped JSI web corpus 2014-2016 German trial 1,987,759,563
Timestamped JSI web corpus 2014-2021 German main 7,055,641,455
Timestamped JSI web corpus 2021-03 German main 126,775,824
Timestamped JSI web corpus 2021-04 German main 89,579,085