Corpora: finding words in their context

A corpus (pl corpora) is a collection of texts (e.g. research articles) that can be used to find how words and expressions are used in context.

• Corpus.byu.edu
  The corpora at this site were created by Mark Davies, Professor of Linguistics at Brigham Young University. They have many different uses, including: finding out how native speakers actually speak and write; looking at language variation and change; finding the frequency of words, phrases, and collocates; and designing authentic language teaching materials and resources.
  
  
• Hyper Collocation
  Hyper Collocation is a search engine for finding example sentences from 811,761 English papers included in arXiv. To clarify typical phrasing, the search results are sorted by the frequency of the collocation. This tool is mainly intended to help academic writing and can be used as an alternative to Springer Exemplar (discontinued).
  
  
• Google Custom Search Engine
  Allows you to create your own search engine by selecting specific sites.