Concordance (publishing)

A concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, listing every
instance of each word with its immediate context. Concordances have been compiled only for works of
special importance, such as the Vedas,[1] Bible, Qur'an or the works of Shakespeare, James Joyce or
classical Latin and Greek authors,[2] because of the time, difficulty, and expense involved in creating a
concordance in the pre-computer era.

Concordance are more than an index; they include additional

material, such as commentary, definitions and topical cross-
indexing, which makes producing them a labor-intensive process,
even when assisted by computers.

In the precomputing era, search 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 topical concordance is a list of subjects that a book covers

(usually The Bible), with the immediate context of the coverage of
Mordecai Nathan's Hebrew-Latin
those subjects. Unlike a traditional concordance, the indexed word
Concordance of the Bible
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 Bible by Hugh of St Cher (d.1262), who
employed 500 monks 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 in 1545, but "the pretty large concordance" of Mr
Cotton did. Then followed Cruden's Concordance and Strong's Concordance.

Contents
Use in linguistics
Inversion
See also
References
External links
Use in linguistics
Concordances are frequently used in linguistics, 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 translations of subsentential elements, e.g. terminology, in bitexts and translation
memories
creating indexes and word lists (also useful for publishing)

Concordancing techniques are widely used in national text corpora 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[3] or more advanced corpus
managers. Some of them have integrated part-of-speech taggers and enable the user to create his/her own
POS-annotated corpora to conduct various type of searches adopted in corpus linguistics.[4]

Inversion
The reconstruction of the text of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls 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 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.[5][6] This was soon
followed by the release of the original text of the scrolls.

See also
Index
A Vedic Word Concordance
Bible concordance
Cross-reference
Key Word in Context
Text mining

References
1. Bloomfield, Maurice (1990). A Vedic Concordance. Motilal Banarsidass Publ. ISBN 81-208-
0654-9.
2. Wisbey, Roy (April 1962). "Concordance Making by Electronic Computer: Some Experiences
with the Wiener Genesis". The Modern Language Review. Modern Humanities Research
Association. 57 (2): 161–172. doi:10.2307/3720960 (https://doi.org/10.2307%2F3720960).
 3. Introduction to WordSmith (http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/introduction.htm?gclid=COjFnvG
KhakCFVJX4Qod-RqjjQ)
4. "Linguistic Toolbox" (http://yatsko.zohosites.com/linguistic-toobox-a-concordancer.html).
Yatsko.zohosites.com. Retrieved 2019-08-26.
5. Hawrysch, George (2002-08-04). "Dr. George Hawrysch's speech on concordance book
launch" (http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2002/310217.shtml). The Ukrainian Weekly, No.
31, Vol. LXX. Ukrainian National Association. Retrieved 2008-06-19.
6. Jillette, Penn. "You May Already be a "Computer Expert" " (https://web.archive.org/web/200803
03021301/http://www.pennandteller.com/sincity/penn-n-teller/pcc/deadsea.html). Archived from
the original (http://pennandteller.com/sincity/penn-n-teller/pcc/deadsea.html) on 2008-03-03.
Retrieved 2008-06-14.

External links
Shakespeare concordance (http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/concordance/) - A
concordance of Shakespeare's complete works (from Open Source Shakespeare)
Online Concordance to the Complete Works of Hryhorii Skovoroda (http://www.arts.ualberta.c
a/~ukr/skovoroda/NEW/) - A concordance to Hryhorii Skovoroda's complete works (University
of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada)
Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts (http://infomotions.com/alex/) - 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 (https://web.archive.org/web/200804
12192310/http://victorian.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/concordance/) - 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.
Concord (https://web.archive.org/web/20090916183318/http://cherry.conncoll.edu/cohar/Progr
ams.htm) - 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 (http://buschmeier.org/bh/study/ccd/) - 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 (http://ctext.org/tools/concordance) - Concordance
lookup and discussion of the continued importance of printed concordances in Sinology -
Chinese Text Project
KH Coder (http://khc.sourceforge.net/en/) - 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.

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This page was last edited on 10 March 2020, at 10:23 (UTC).

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