Concordance (publishing)

Definition and Purpose of Concordances - A concordance is an alphabetical list of words used in a book or body of work. - It lists every instance of each word with its immediate context. - Concordances have historically been compiled for important works like the Vedas, Bible, and Shakespeare's works. - Creating a concordance was time-consuming and expensive before computers. - Concordances are more than indexes and include additional material like commentary and definitions. Use of Concordances in Linguistics - Concordances are frequently used in linguistics to study texts. - They are used to compare different usages of the same word. - Concordances are helpful in analyzing keywords and word frequencies. - They aid in finding and analyzing phrases and idioms. - Concordances are used to find translations of subsentential elements in bitexts and translation memories. Inversion and the Use of Concordances in Dead Sea Scrolls - The reconstruction of the text of some Dead Sea Scrolls involved a concordance. - Access to the scrolls was restricted, but Martin Abegg used a computer to invert a concordance of missing documents. - This allowed for an approximate reconstruction of the original text of 17 documents. - The release of the original text of the scrolls followed this breakthrough. Related Concepts and Tools - A topical concordance is a list of subjects covered in a book, like Naves Topical Bible. - Other related concepts include cross-references, Key Word in Context, and indexing. - Text mining is also related to concordances. - Concordancing techniques are used in national text corpora like the American National Corpus. - Stand-alone applications known as concordancers or corpus managers utilize concordancing techniques. Additional Resources and Tools - Wikisource has the text of the 1905 New International Encyclopedia article on concordance. - Online concordances are available for Shakespeare's works and Hryhorii Skovoroda's complete works. - The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts offers concordances for its collection of public domain texts. - Hyper-Concordance is a program that scans and displays lines based on user commands. - Other tools include Concord, ConcorDance, Chinese Text Project Concordance Tool, KH Coder, and the electronic concordance of Armenian literature.