The Sketch Engine has been adopted by four of the UK’s five major dictionary publishers. Lexical Computing Ltd is working with Oxford University Press to analyse children’s language and Cambridge University Press to analyse the language produced by learners of English. National language institutes in nine European countries and 200 universities worldwide use it to support language research, dictionary production, language technology products and to enable language teaching. It has allowed users to access information on between 30 million and 70 billion words in 61 different languages. Lexical Computing Ltd now employs staff in the UK and the Czech Republic, along with freelancers in a number of other countries. Half of the company’s business is overseas and it runs training courses around the world.
The Sketch Engine has also been used to substantiate arguments in a pervasive debate about language use in the art world. A 2010 analysis of exhibition announcements, which utilised the Sketch Engine’s search tool, was published in the US art journal Triple Canopy and sparked an international debate on the language of art. This journal article has since become a widely circulated piece of online cultural criticism, sparking further debates on other forums, including Wordpress, Tumblr, Google+, Ikono, Artblog and Artsia.