British National Corpus

http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/

This website allows you to quickly and easily search the 100 million word British National Corpus (1970s-1993). The BNC was originally created by Oxford University Press in the 1980s - early 1990s, and now exists in various versions on the web. If you find this version useful, you may also be interested in other corpora that we have created, including the 410+ million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990-2010) and the 400+ million word Corpus of Historical American English (1810-2009).

As with some other BNC interfaces, you can search for words and phrases by exact word or phrase, wildcard or part of speech, or combinations of these.  You can also search for surrounding words (collocates) within a ten-word window (e.g. all nouns somewhere near paper, all adjectives near woman, or all nouns near spin).