license: other
license_name: proprietary-license-required
license_link: LICENSE
pretty_name: Usenet Corpus 1980–2013
size_categories:
- 100B<n<1T
task_categories:
- text-generation
- text-classification
language:
- en
- pl
- nl
- es
- fr
- it
- de
- ru
- ja
tags:
- usenet
- internet-history
- forums
- long-form-text
- pre-web
- conversational
extra_gated_prompt: >-
This is a proprietary dataset. Access is granted for evaluation only and
conveys no right to use, copy, or train on the data. Any use requires a
separate written commercial license from OwnedByDanes LLC. See the LICENSE
file. To request a license, contact todd@ownedbydanes.com.
Usenet Corpus 1980–2013
A large, cleaned corpus of Usenet posts spanning 1980–2013 — long-form, pre-web conversational text across the full newsgroup hierarchy. A thread- reconstructed companion (Usenet Corpus 1980–2013 — Threaded) adds conversation structure over identical content.
▶ Free preview — no gating. Browse a showcase sample of complete conversations at Usenet-Corpus-1980-2013-Full-Samples — no access request needed.
▶ License the full corpus. This dataset is available for commercial use — training, fine-tuning, evaluation, and retrieval. To discuss access and terms, contact todd@ownedbydanes.com.
- Posts: 408,033,020
- Tokens: 103,092,966,133 (103.09B,
cl100k_base) - Newsgroups: 18,347
- Distinct posts after de-duplication: 343,700,814 (15.77% of posts are cross-post copies)
- Format: gzipped JSON Lines, one post per line, one file per newsgroup
- Primary language: English (~95–99% per hierarchy; smaller Polish, Dutch, and other-language segments, chiefly within ALT)
Post counts are raw (a message cross-posted to k groups appears in k files). Cross-posting is measured; see De-duplication for the distinct figure.
As distributed: the published repository withholds 12 newsgroups (a documented ClamAV false positive — see Distribution & omissions below). The downloadable dataset contains 18,335 newsgroups, 405,794,692 posts, and 102.517B tokens. The figures and tables below describe the full processed corpus.
Contents by hierarchy
ALT is split into two equal-by-name halves for distribution
(usenet-alt-part1, usenet-alt-part2), divided alphabetically at
[fill: last group of part1, e.g. "alt.k…"]. Percentages are token share.
| Hierarchy | Newsgroups | Posts | Tokens | Tokens (B) | % of Corpus | Avg Tok/Post | Date Range | Compressed | Uncompressed | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ALT-PART2 | 7,644 | 136,065,542 | 34,954,698,086 | 34.955 | 33.91% | 256.9 | 1984–2013 | 49.18 GB | 152.93 GB | 3.11x |
| ALT-PART1 | 7,644 | 92,497,667 | 23,844,798,822 | 23.845 | 23.13% | 257.8 | 1981–2013 | 32.62 GB | 104.21 GB | 3.19x |
| REC | 919 | 77,237,482 | 16,501,957,075 | 16.502 | 16.01% | 213.7 | 1984–2013 | 26.38 GB | 78.07 GB | 2.96x |
| COMP | 1,205 | 49,973,522 | 10,274,541,738 | 10.275 | 9.97% | 205.6 | 1980–2013 | 17.10 GB | 50.55 GB | 2.96x |
| SOC | 341 | 22,387,270 | 8,220,160,115 | 8.220 | 7.97% | 367.2 | 1980–2013 | 11.79 GB | 34.86 GB | 2.96x |
| SCI | 237 | 11,996,904 | 3,305,179,761 | 3.305 | 3.21% | 275.5 | 1986–2013 | 5.46 GB | 16.07 GB | 2.94x |
| MISC | 242 | 10,867,041 | 2,706,808,695 | 2.707 | 2.63% | 249.1 | 1986–2013 | 4.41 GB | 13.30 GB | 3.02x |
| NEWS | 60 | 2,072,402 | 1,716,989,042 | 1.717 | 1.67% | 828.5 | 1980–2013 | 2.04 GB | 6.50 GB | 3.19x |
| TALK | 47 | 4,308,542 | 1,347,092,214 | 1.347 | 1.31% | 312.7 | 1986–2013 | 1.88 GB | 5.74 GB | 3.06x |
| HUMANITIES | 8 | 626,648 | 220,740,585 | 0.221 | 0.21% | 352.3 | 1992–2013 | 374.27 MB | 1.05 GB | 2.79x |
| TOTAL | 18,347 | 408,033,020 | 103,092,966,133 | 103.093 | 100.00% | 252.7 | 1980–2013 | 151.24 GB | 463.27 GB | 3.06x |
Languages
Content is predominantly English (~96.6% of posts). Language was detected automatically per post with fastText LID-176; figures are record counts on the raw (pre-de-duplication) corpus, not token shares. Automated detection on short, quoted, or code-switched Usenet text is error-prone, so treat these as approximate, especially the lower-count languages, which include some misclassification.
Languages with at least 100,000 posts:
| Language | Code | Posts |
|---|---|---|
| English | en | 394,350,819 |
| Polish | pl | 3,719,737 |
| Dutch | nl | 2,596,453 |
| Spanish | es | 2,124,609 |
| French | fr | 1,669,450 |
| Italian | it | 743,411 |
| German | de | 638,250 |
| Russian | ru | 366,240 |
| Japanese | ja | 268,684 |
| Indonesian | id | 218,168 |
| Portuguese | pt | 205,489 |
| Chinese | zh | 163,198 |
| Romanian | ro | 112,149 |
| Esperanto | eo | 109,382 |
Roughly 40 further languages appear in smaller volumes (each under 100,000 posts) and are not itemized here; those low-count labels are the least reliable.
Record schema
Each line is a JSON object:
| Field | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
id |
string | Stable per-post identifier (msg- + SHA-256 hash of the original Message-ID). |
group |
string | Newsgroup the post was archived under. |
date |
string | Original post date (RFC 2822). A small number of records carry malformed dates. |
author |
string | Author display name as posted. Email addresses are redacted. |
subject |
string | Subject line. |
text |
string | Post body. |
Cleaning, safety, and provenance
Binary attachments and alt.binaries.* groups were removed; adult-content groups
were excluded; author email addresses were redacted; and Message-IDs were replaced
with salted hashes. Content is otherwise preserved as posted, including period
spelling, formatting, and views.
Malware pass. The corpus was scanned with ClamAV in two stages: a per-post signature scan, then a whole-file scan with minimal-span localization for signatures spanning multiple posts (e.g. multi-part encoded binaries). Any content matching a ClamAV signature was removed. The pass is deliberately conservative: matches on quoted phishing emails or exploit code reproduced in discussion of a threat were removed along with genuine payloads, erring toward a corpus that passes the same scanner infrastructure downstream users run. All removals are logged. Removed content totals well under 0.1% of posts and is concentrated in security-, virus-, and warez-oriented groups. The distributed corpus passes a whole-file ClamAV scan with no detections.
Distribution & omissions. Twelve newsgroups are withheld from the published repository. Their historical content — security, hacking, and net-abuse discussion, plus a JavaScript programming group — matches an over-broad antivirus signature that produces a false positive on the archived text. The identical files scan clean under current ClamAV definitions (they matched only an older signature database), and were withheld so the distributed dataset passes automated security scanning without exception. The omitted groups (about 0.55% of posts): alt.games.tombraider, alt.games.mame, alt.hacker, alt.support.depression.medication, alt.quotations, comp.lang.javascript, comp.security.misc, rec.skydiving, rec.radio.amateur.equipment, rec.arts.comics.dc.universe, rec.music.rock-pop-r+b.1970s, news.admin.net-abuse.sightings.
De-duplication. Cross-posting was pervasive on Usenet: a message posted to
several newsgroups is stored once per group and shares one identifier across them.
Of 408,033,020 posts, 343,700,814 are distinct — 15.77% are cross-post copies.
The copies are retained rather than removed, because the set of groups a message
was posted to is itself signal; the shared id lets a user collapse them in a
single pass if desired. De-duplication must be corpus-wide, not per-file or
per-hierarchy: 13.08M identifiers appear in more than one hierarchy. Duplication is
uneven by hierarchy (SOC ~18%, ALT ~15%, HUMANITIES ~1%), tracking where
cross-posting was culturally heaviest. Token totals above are likewise raw and
include cross-post copies.
Missing identifiers. About 2.36M posts (~0.6%) have no recoverable Message-ID (missing or unparseable at archival). These are excluded from de-duplication.
Intended use and licensing
This is a proprietary dataset owned by OwnedByDanes LLC. It is made available
for evaluation of a potential commercial license only. Downloading or accessing
the files conveys no right to use, copy, redistribute, or train on the data;
any such use requires a separate written commercial license from OwnedByDanes LLC.
Gated-access approval is not a license. See the LICENSE file for the full notice.
To request a commercial license (including training/evaluation use for language
models), contact todd@ownedbydanes.com.
Considerations
Usenet is unmoderated historical text. It contains offensive, biased, and factually wrong content, and reflects the demographics and norms of its era. It is a snapshot of how people wrote and argued online from 1980 to 2013, and should be treated as a primary historical source, not as vetted or representative of any group's views.
Citation
@dataset{usenet_corpus_1980_2013,
title = {Usenet Corpus 1980--2013},
author = {OwnedByDanes},
year = {2026},
note = {Cleaned; commercially licensed},
url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/OwnedByDanes/Usenet-Corpus-1980-2013-Full}
}