Recently, language professionals have become increasingly aware that they can make efficient use of tailor-made collections of texts for various activities. This is particularly true for activities involving some kind of text production, such as translation, technical writing or terminology management. After a short introduction, the present article starts with discussing corpus linguistics, the central concept(s) ‘text corpus’ as well as its real-world manifestations (section 2). Based on these conceptual fundamentals, two different user profiles are outlined with regard to special language reference tools (section 3). Section 4 is about the practical use of text corpora by language professionals. In the following section 5, the author takes a look beyond the boundaries of text corpora to shed some light on an intelligent combination of languages technologies and language resources. Section 6 concludes with a brief outlook and a short discussion of research desiderata for the topic at hand.