Hello CVA Team - Here is a list of websites that might be useful for finding good examples of the target words in appropriate contexts. Let me know if you have any to add to the list!
National Academy Press allows you to access over 2,000 online books, all SMET texts, for free. allows you to browse categories of their online text, then search for specific words. The search engine will tell you how many occurrences of the target word were found in specific chapters of their books, and you can read the specific chapters (and use open-apple-F to find the word within the page). With a little bit of fussing, you can save full-text versions of desired excerpts as PDF or HTML files for future work.
http://www.digital.library.upenn.edu/
This website offers online access to an extensive collection of Oxford Books' history texts and other ebook resources, with a powerful search engine to help you find specific textual references.
The Internet Public Library Online
Texts Collection contains over 17,000 titles that can be browsed by author, by
title, or by Dewey Decimal Classification.
This internet publisher of literature, reference, and verse offers access to thousands of online book resources free of charge.
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/uvaonline.html
The Electronic Text Center's
holdings include approximately 51,000 on- and off-line humanities texts in
twelve languages, with more than 350,000 related images (book illustrations,
covers, manuscripts, newspaper pages, page images of Special Collections books,
museum objects, etc.)
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/hypertex.html
Created by American Studies
students at the University of Virginia, this page offers links to books written
by several American authors.
Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science is supposed to have a collection of ebooks free and available for searching, but I am still trying to find the correct working address...I will keep you posted. Let me know if you find it first!
Project Guttenberg allows you to search the thousands of full-text resources of the University at North Carolina PG server.
SOME SITES INTENDED FOR CHILDREN:
Search the current issue of this children's magazine, recent issues, and the archives.
http://www.magickeys.com/books/
This site contains several online books for children and young adults that can be searched for target words.