In this paper, we report a corpus-based investigation on the spread of use of English words in Brazilian Portuguese. For this purpose, we employed the Bank of Portuguese, a corpus created by the DIRECT Project (LAEL, PUC/SP), with over 230 million words, from spoken and written sources, and the British National Corpus, with 100 million words, from writing and speech as well. Our research is motivated by the following points: (1) the need for the engagement of linguists and applied linguists in debates over public policies, (2) the fact that this is a theme pursued by John Robert Schmitz, and (3) the lack of studies on foreign word borrowings based on electronic corpora. Results suggest that (1) a large number of English words are in use in Brazilian Portuguese, (2) their frequency is low, and (3) these words take on new different meanings from English