Let's say you've found a new word. You've looked it up in a dictionary and found an example sentence or two. Perhaps you've also found what other words it collocates with. (I'll be looking at some online tools to find collocates, in another post). What you'd like to do now is to see how it's used in context.
One possibilty is to use a corpus, ("a collection of samples of real-world texts stored on computer. Plural - corpora" - Leoxicon), but these can sometimes be difficult to use, and when they include spoken language, the grammar is occasionally "non-standard", let's say. The British National Corpus is easy to use, but be careful with examples from spoken language.
Another way is to do a simple Google (or other) search. The Internet is one enormous corpus if you think about it, although no linguist has "collected" these examples. But a simple search can bring up a lot of irrelevant material, and again you're not really assured of grammatical correctness.
What I like to do is a Google site search of trusted newspapers and other websites, which are in effect small corpora, or look in Google Books, where the material has been edited and proofread, so is likely to be grammatically correct.
