Computers store texts as bytes in files, while humans care for interpretation.

When you make queries to corpora, some of your queries are about forms. For instance, you can check the most popular options for spelling dot com. Do people use "dot.com"? Or maybe you wonder whether the spelling "encyclopedia" is nowadays more common than "encyclopaedia" in British English... If your corpora are of the right genre and from the right time frame, chances are that you can find a solution to your questions.

However, most of your queries are about meanings. What do the terms dot com and encyclop(a)edia mean? When computers produce results of queries, they act on the basis of forms only, therefore, even though you are interested in meanings, you still have to formulate your queries in terms of forms.

In the following pages you will find out about several aspects that you have to be careful about when you formulate your queries, because they can affect the results you get from the corpus.