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A concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal
word A word is a basic element of language that carries an semantics, objective or pragmatics, practical semantics, meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of w ...
s used in a book or body of work, listing every instance of each word with its immediate
context Context may refer to: * Context (language use), the relevant constraints of the communicative situation that influence language use, language variation, and discourse summary Computing * Context (computing), the virtual environment required to su ...
. Concordances have been compiled only for works of special importance, such as the
Vedas upright=1.2, The Vedas are ancient Sanskrit texts of Hinduism. Above: A page from the '' Atharvaveda''. The Vedas (, , ) are a large body of religious texts originating in ancient India. Composed in Vedic Sanskrit, the texts constitute the ...
,
Bible The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts of a ...
,
Qur'an The Quran (, ; Standard Arabic: , Quranic Arabic: , , 'the recitation'), also romanized Qur'an or Koran, is the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be a revelation from God. It is organized in 114 chapters (pl.: , sing. ...
or the works of
Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...
,
James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...
or classical Latin and Greek authors, because of the time, difficulty, and expense involved in creating a concordance in the pre-
computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...
era. A concordance is more than an
index Index (or its plural form indices) may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities * Index (''A Certain Magical Index''), a character in the light novel series ''A Certain Magical Index'' * The Index, an item on a Halo megastru ...
, with additional material such as commentary, definitions and topical
cross-indexing An index (plural: usually indexes, more rarely indices; see below) is a list of words or phrases ('headings') and associated pointers ('locators') to where useful material relating to that heading can be found in a document or collection of doc ...
which makes producing one a labor-intensive process even when assisted by computers. In the precomputing era,
search Searching or search may refer to: Computing technology * Search algorithm, including keyword search ** :Search algorithms * Search and optimization for problem solving in artificial intelligence * Search engine technology, software for findi ...
technology was unavailable, and a concordance offered readers of long works such as the Bible something comparable to search results for every word that they would have been likely to search for. Today, the ability to combine the result of queries concerning multiple terms (such as searching for words near other words) has reduced interest in concordance publishing. In addition, mathematical techniques such as latent semantic indexing have been proposed as a means of automatically identifying linguistic information based on word context. A bilingual concordance is a concordance based on
aligned parallel text A parallel text is a text placed alongside its translation or translations. Parallel text alignment is the identification of the corresponding sentences in both halves of the parallel text. The Loeb Classical Library and the Clay Sanskrit Libra ...
. A topical concordance is a list of subjects that a book covers (usually The Bible), with the immediate context of the coverage of those subjects. Unlike a traditional concordance, the indexed word does not have to appear in the verse. The best-known topical concordance is Nave's Topical Bible. The first Bible concordance was compiled for the
Vulgate The Vulgate (; also called (Bible in common tongue), ) is a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible. The Vulgate is largely the work of Jerome who, in 382, had been commissioned by Pope Damasus I to revise the Gospels u ...
Bible by
Hugh of St Cher Hugh of Saint-Cher ( la, Hugo de Sancto Charo), Dominican Order, O.P. (c. 1200 – 19 March 1263) was a French people, French Dominican Order, Dominican friar who became a cardinal (Catholicism), cardinal and noted Bible, biblical commentator. ...
(d.1262), who employed 500 friars to assist him. In 1448, Rabbi Mordecai Nathan completed a concordance to the Hebrew Bible. It took him ten years. A concordance to the Greek New Testament was published in 1599 by Henry Stephens, and the Septuagint was done a couple of years later by Conrad Kircher in 1602. The first concordance to the English Bible was published in 1550 by Mr Marbeck. According to Cruden, it did not employ the verse numbers devised by
Robert Stephens Sir Robert Graham Stephens (14 July 193112 November 1995) was a leading English actor in the early years of Britain's Royal National Theatre. He was one of the most respected actors of his generation and was at one time regarded as the natur ...
in 1545, but "the pretty large concordance" of Mr Cotton did. Then followed Cruden's Concordance and
Strong's Concordance ''The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible'', generally known as ''Strong's Concordance'', is a Bible concordance, an index of every word in the King James Version (KJV), constructed under the direction of James Strong. Strong first published h ...
.


Use in linguistics

Concordances are frequently used in
linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
, when studying a text. For example: * comparing different usages of the same word * analysing keywords * analysing word frequencies * finding and analysing phrases and idioms * finding
translation Translation is the communication of the Meaning (linguistic), meaning of a #Source and target languages, source-language text by means of an Dynamic and formal equivalence, equivalent #Source and target languages, target-language text. The ...
s of subsentential elements, e.g.
terminology Terminology is a group of specialized words and respective meanings in a particular field, and also the study of such terms and their use; the latter meaning is also known as terminology science. A ''term'' is a word, compound word, or multi-wor ...
, in bitexts and translation memories * creating indexes and word lists (also useful for publishing) Concordancing techniques are widely used in national
text corpora In linguistics, a corpus (plural ''corpora'') or text corpus is a language resource consisting of a large and structured set of texts (nowadays usually electronically stored and processed). In corpus linguistics, they are used to do statistical ...
such as American National Corpus, British National Corpus, and Corpus of Contemporary American English available on-line. Stand-alone applications that employ concordancing techniques are known as concordancers or more advanced
corpus manager A corpus manager (corpus browser or corpus query system) is a tool for multilingual corpus analysis, which allows effective searching in corpora. A corpus manager usually represents a complex tool that allows one to perform searches for language ...
s. Some of them have integrated part-of-speech taggers and enable the user to create their own
POS POS, Pos or PoS may refer to: Linguistics * Part of speech, the role that a word or phrase plays in a sentence * Poverty of the stimulus, a linguistic term used in language acquisition and development * Sayula Popoluca (ISO 639-3), an indigenous l ...
-annotated corpora to conduct various types of searches adopted in corpus linguistics.


Inversion

The reconstruction of the text of some of the
Dead Sea Scrolls The Dead Sea Scrolls (also the Qumran Caves Scrolls) are ancient Jewish and Hebrew religious manuscripts discovered between 1946 and 1956 at the Qumran Caves in what was then Mandatory Palestine, near Ein Feshkha in the West Bank, on the nor ...
involved a concordance. Access to some of the scrolls was governed by a "secrecy rule" that allowed only the original International Team or their designates to view the original materials. After the death of Roland de Vaux in 1971, his successors repeatedly refused to even allow the publication of photographs to other scholars. This restriction was circumvented by
Martin Abegg Martin G. Abegg Jr. (born 1950) is a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, researcher, and professor. Abegg is responsible for reconstructing the full text of the Dead Sea Scrolls from the Dead Sea Scrolls concordance, a project that broke the lengthy publicati ...
in 1991, who used a computer to "invert" a concordance of the missing documents made in the 1950s which had come into the hands of scholars outside of the International Team, to obtain an approximate reconstruction of the original text of 17 of the documents. This was soon followed by the release of the original text of the scrolls.


See also

* A Vedic Word Concordance * Bible concordance *
Cross-reference The term cross-reference (abbreviation: xref) can refer to either: * An instance within a document which refers to related information elsewhere in the same document. In both printed and online dictionaries cross-references are important because ...
*
Key Word in Context Key Word In Context (KWIC) is the most common format for concordance lines. The term KWIC was first coined by Hans Peter Luhn. The system was based on a concept called ''keyword in titles'' which was first proposed for Manchester libraries in 1864 ...
*
Index Index (or its plural form indices) may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities * Index (''A Certain Magical Index''), a character in the light novel series ''A Certain Magical Index'' * The Index, an item on a Halo megastru ...
* Text mining


References


External links


Shakespeare concordance
- A concordance of Shakespeare's complete works (from Open Source Shakespeare)
Online Concordance to the Complete Works of Hryhorii Skovoroda
- A concordance to
Hryhorii Skovoroda Hryhorii Skovoroda, also Gregory Skovoroda or Grigory Skovoroda ( la, Gregorius Scovoroda; uk, Григорій Савич Сковорода, ''Hryhorii Savych Skovoroda''; russian: Григо́рий Са́ввич Сковорода́, ...
's complete works (University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada)
Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts
- The Alex Catalogue is a collection of public domain electronic texts from American and English literature as well as Western philosophy. Each of the 14,000 items in the Catalogue are available as full-text but they are also complete with a concordance. Consequently, you are able to count the number of times a particular word is used in a text or list the most common (10, 25, 50, etc.) words.
Hyper-Concordance, Mitsu Matsuoka, Nagoya University
- The Hyper-Concordance is written in C++, a program that scans and displays lines based on a command entered by the user. Includes Victorian, British & Irish, and American literatures.

- Page includes link to Concord, an on-the-fly KWIC concordance generator. Works with at least some non-Latin scripts (modern Greek, for instance). Multiple choices for sorting results; multi-platform; Open Source.
ConcorDance
- A concordance interface to the WorldWideWeb, it uses Google's or Yahoo's search engine to find concordances and can be used directly from the browser.
Chinese Text Project Concordance Tool
- Concordance lookup and discussion of the continued importance of printed concordances in
Sinology Sinology, or Chinese studies, is an academic discipline that focuses on the study of China primarily through Chinese philosophy, language, literature, culture and history and often refers to Western scholarship. Its origin "may be traced to th ...
- Chinese Text Project
KH Coder
- A free software for KWIC concordance and collocation stats generation. Various statistical analysis functions are also available such as co-occurrence network, multidimensional scaling, hierarchical cluster analysis, and correspondence analysis of words.
The electronic concordance of the Armenian literature
- Armenian literature of concordances has a rich history, but one of its breakthrough stages was marked by the creation of a large Armenian electronic concordance available on the website. The electronic concordances are advantageously distinguished from both typographical, printed concordances and foreign-language electronic concordances. Those differences refer to the choice of authors, the structure, and the presentation of the headword. {{DEFAULTSORT:Concordance (Publishing) Information science