Corpus (noun)

1. A collection of written or spoken material in machine-readable form, assembled for the purpose of linguistic research.
2. The main body or substantial part of a book or other written work, as distinct from other material such as notes, appendices, and illustrations.

Origin:

From latin 'corpus' ('body').

Examples:

1. The linguist used the corpus of Shakespeare's plays to study Elizabethan English.
2. The corpus of scientific papers on the topic is quite extensive.
3. The corpus of medieval Latin is much smaller than that of classical Latin.
4. The corpus of data collected from the survey was analyzed for patterns.
5. The corpus of the manuscript has been preserved, but the illustrations have been lost.