On Consist of and Made up of: A Corpora-Based Analysis

Abstract

The ultimate goal of this article is to show that consist of and made up of are somewhat different in their use. It is worth pointing out that the type made up of (1,129 tokens) may be preferable to the type consist of (993 tokens) in the UK. A further point to note is that consist of is 57.14% the same as made up of. Talking about consist of and made up of in the Hansard Corpus (20, April 2022. Online https://english-corpora.org /hansard/), the former is preferable to the latter in the British parliament. Quite interestingly, consist of was the most preferable one (942 tokens) for British politicians in 1960, but it was the least preferred one (49 tokens) in 1800. On the other hand, made up of reached a peak (1,020 tokens) in the British parliament in 1990. More importantly, the BNC (20, April 2022. Online https://corpus.byu.edu/bnc) shows that consist of people is the most frequently used one in the UK, whereas made up of people and made up of representatives are the most widely used ones. Finally, it is worthwhile noting that 6.66% of forty five nouns are the collocations of both consist of and made up of.