The Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English, including the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, second edition (PPCME2), the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME), and the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English, second edition (PPCMBE2), are running texts and text samples of British English prose across its history - from the earliest Middle English documents up to the First World War. The texts come in three forms: simple text, part-of-speech tagged text and syntactically annotated text. The syntactic annotation (parsing) permits searching not only for words and word sequences, but also for syntactic structure. All of the annotation has been carefully reviewed by expert human annotators for accuracy and consistency. The corpora are designed for the use of students and scholars of the history of English, especially the historical syntax of the language, and they are publicly available to individuals, research groups and libraries.

For more information, including the annotation guidelines for the corpora, see the corpus homepage: Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English.