Czech is one of the many languages whose text corpora are included in Sketch Engine, a tool for discovering how language works. Sketch Engine is designed for linguists, lexicologists, lexicographers, researchers, translators, terminologists, teachers and students working with Czech to easily discover what is typical and frequent in the language and to notice phenomena which would go unnoticed without a large sample of Czech text.

Sketch Engine has tools to identify and analyse collocations, synonyms and antonyms, examples of use in context, keywords or terms. Frequency word lists of Czech single-word or multi-word expressions of various types can be generated. Even users without any technical knowledge can create their own Czech corpus using the Sketch Engine's intuitive built-in tool.

Tools to work with Czech text corpora

To work with the Czech language, Sketch Engine offers the following tools:

Czech Word Sketch

Word Sketch is the easiest way to get an at-a-glance overview of a word’s behaviour. Collocations are displayed in categorized lists to identify strong and weak collocates easily. more»

Available Word Sketches for user corpora: Full-featured Sketch grammar.

Word Sketch difference will compare two word sketches and will indicate which collocates tend to combine with one word or the other. The information can be used to avoid mistakes in word choice or to study the differences between two words with a similar meaning. more»

Czech concordance

The concordancer included in Sketch Engine can be used to display a list of examples (called concordance) of the search word or phrase as it appears in Czech language text corpora. The search will display the keyword with some context to the right and context to the left of the keyword (KWIC concordance). more»

Czech term extraction

Terminology extraction is a feature of Sketch Engine which automatically identifies single-word and multi-word terms in a subject-specific Czech text by comparing it to a general Czech corpus. The tool is aimed at translators, terminologists, ESP teachers and anyone who needs to deal with domain texts. The screen with results includes links to example sentences and Wikipedia definitions. more»

Bilingual term extraction

Parallel corpora are used to extract terms in two languages simultaneously and display a terminology list with translations into the other language. more»

Czech thesaurus

The thesaurus is a feature that automatically generates a list of words similar in meaning to the keyword. more»

Czech word lists

The word list feature will generate a frequency list of all words that appear in a text or corpus. A very large corpus can be used to generate a list of all words that exist in Czech or all words that start, contain or end with specific characters. Advanced options can be used to generate lists of grammatical categories or parts of speech used in a corpus together with their frequencies. more»

N-grams in Czech

Generating a list of N-grams contained in a text makes it possible to identify and study patterns and notice phenomena related to multi-word units (MWU) in Czech that cannot be detected by other tools. more»

List of available Czech corpora

  • trial – available to both trial users as well as paying subscribers
  • main – only available to paying subscribers
  • on demand – access to the corpus is subject to specific terms, click the corpus name for details
CorpusAccess policySize in words
csSkELL v1 (whole documents) main 1,717,516,129
csSkELL v2.2 (sentences with GDEX scores) main 1,443,410,941
Czech Drama Corpus main 135,105
Czech news and web 1995–2002 (czes2.2) main 366,796,757
Czech parliamentary debates (ParlaMint 2.1) trial 22,087,036
Czech parliamentary debates (ParlaMint 2.1, CoNLL format) trial 22,104,199
Czech Trends (2014–today) trial 2,069,890,023
Czech Web (csTenTen 12+17+19) trial 11,722,066,502
Czech Web 2012 (csTenTen12 v9a) main 4,175,089,441
Czech Web 2019 (csTenTen19) main 6,280,217,621
Czech Web 2023 (csTenTen23) trial 4,456,427,977
CzechParl 2012 (v2 with lempos) main 37,184,025
DGT-Translation Memory parallel – Czech main 43,621,933
ELEXIS Czech Web 2019 main 949,730,627
ELEXIS Czech Web 2019 (csTenTen19) WSD sample main 1,970,054
EUR-Lex 2/2016 parallel – Czech trial 350,230,088
EUR-Lex judgments 12/2016 parallel – Czech trial 18,226,505
Europarl spoken parallel – Czech trial 13,013,774
Gutenberg Czech 2020 main 364,683
Merlin Written Learner Czech main 75,526
Open Parallel Corpus (OPUS) – Czech main 203,845,619
OpenSubtitles 2018 parallel – Czech main 453,218,524
ParlaTalk Czech Republic parliamentary debates (lower house) trial 22,091,557
ParlaTalk Czech Republic parliamentary debates (upper house) trial 11,737,338
ParlaTalk Czechia - parliamentary debates main 23,244,838
Timestamped JSI web corpus 2021-03 Czech main 20,431,801
Timestamped JSI web corpus 2021-04 Czech main 15,095,366