You can enter any text in the form at the left -- for example, a paper that you've written, or a newspaper article that you've copied from another website. After inputting the text, you can then see useful information about words and phrases in that text, based on data from COCA.

First, it will highlight all of the medium and lower-frequency words in your text and create lists of these words that you can use offline. This frequency data can help language learners focus on new words, and it can allow you to see "what the text is about" (i.e. text-specific words).

Second, you can click through the words in the text to see a detailed "word sketch" of any of the words -- showing their definition and their translation (in more than 100 languages); links to pronunciation, images, and videos; related topics, collocates, "clusters" (2, 3, and 4-word phrases); and concordance lines.

Finally, you can do powerful searches on selected phrases in your text, to show related phrases in COCA. In this way, this resource is like a "collocational thesaurus" to see what related phrases are most likely in different styles of English.

Just enter some text, and there will be more help files on the next page.