Language is an expression of culture. The languages of biomedicine and health express the activities, and also the thoughts and ideals, of the members of a community. The languages of biomedicine and health are therefore quite distinct from, for example, general English. There is, of course, a large vocabulary of technical terms which are virtually exclusive to biomedicine and health. Additionally, there are patterns of grammar - for example, the high prevalence of sentences written in the passive voice, and the frequent use of hedging devices. There are also conventions of discourse, such as the progression of introduction, methods, results and discussion which are common in research papers. 

In order to discover the special features of language in the various domains of biomedicine and health, the Centre for Biomedical and Health Linguistics assembles and analyzes corpora (collections of literature) representative of the various sub-disciplines and genre. You may search our corpora for authentic examples of usage of keywords using our  on-line concordancer.