The PELCRA Reference Corpus of Polish was developed between 1996 and 2005 (between 2003 and 2005 as a research project of the State Committee for Scientific Research, grant no. 2 H01D 008 25) to address the need for a large reference corpus of Polish for research and applications. The corpus contained ca. 100 000 000 words, including both written (90% of the corpus) and spoken texts, mainly contemporary ones (95%).
As of 2008, the PELCRA corpus became a part of the National Corpus of Polish.