Concordance (publishing)

A concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, with their immediate contexts. Because of the time and difficulty and expense involved in creating a concordance in the pre-computer era, only works of special importance, such as the Vedas,1 Bible, Qur'an or the works of Shakespeare, had concordances prepared for them.
Mordecai Nathan's Hebrew-Latin Concordance of the bible

Even with the use of computers, producing a concordance (whether on paper or in a computer) may require much manual work, because they often include additional material, including commentary on, or definitions of, the indexed words, and topical cross-indexing that is not yet possible with computer-generated and computerized concordances.

However, when the text of a work is on a computer, a search function can carry out the basic task of a concordance, and is in some respects even more versatile than one on paper.

A bilingual concordance is a concordance based on aligned parallel text.

A topical concordance is a list of subjects that a book (usually The Bible) covers, 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 most well known topical concordance is Nave's Topical Bible.

The first concordance, to the Vulgate Bible, was compiled 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. 1599 saw a concordance to the Greek New Testament published 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.

Use in linguistics

Concordances are frequently acclimated in linguistics, back belief a text. For example:

comparing altered usages of the aforementioned word

analysing keywords

analysing chat frequencies

award and analysing phrases and idioms

award translations of subsentential elements, e.g. terminology, in bitexts and adaptation memories

creating indexes and chat lists (also advantageous for publishing)

Concordancing techniques are broadly acclimated in civic corpora such as American Civic Corpus, British Civic Corpus, and Bulk of Contemporary American English accessible on-line. Stand-alone applications that apply concordancing techniques are accepted as concordancers 2. Some of them accept chip part-of-speech taggers and accredit the user to actualize his/her own pos-annotated corpora to conduct assorted blazon of searches adopted in bulk linguistics.

Inverting a concordance

A acclaimed use of a acceding complex the about-face of the argument of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls from a concordance.

Access to some of the scrolls was absolute by a "secrecy rule" that accustomed alone the aboriginal International Team or their designates to appearance the aboriginal materials. After the afterlife of Roland de Vaux in 1971, his breed again banned to alike acquiesce the advertisement of photographs to added scholars. This brake was baffled by Martin Abegg in 1991, who acclimated a computer to "invert" a acceding of the missing abstracts fabricated in the 1950s which had appear into the easily of advisers alfresco of the International Team, to access an almost about-face of the aboriginal argument of 17 of the documents.[4][5] This was anon followed by the absolution of the aboriginal argument of the scrolls.