How do you search for nouns that contain the sequence of letters sb in the Corpus of Contemporary American English?

Question

I am trying to design a word list for a phonetics project. I can use wildcard searches in the corpus such as * sb * which will return all words that contain this sequence of letters (either medially or word-initially). However, I want to restrict this search to a specific lexical category (nouns). Is there a way to search for this.

Short version: How do I ask the corpus for all nouns that contain the sequence of letters sb?

Thanks,

Answer 1

This is fairly straightforward and should be captured by the help pages on the COCA site:

*sb*.[n*]

I created a presentation that explains the basics of COCA searching (slides 26 - 45). There's also a video on YouTube of a presentation I gave at a teacher's conference (explanation starts here).