Concordance
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A Concordance is an Index of the Words in a Publication.
- AKA: Word Index.
- Context:
- It can be generated by a Concordancer System.
- See: Table of Contents, List of Figures.
References
- http://library.fandm.edu/glossary.html
- Concordance: An index of all the principal words in a work, showing location in the text, and sometimes defining the words.
- (Wikipedia, 2009) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 Bible, Qur'an or the works of Shakespeare, had concordances prepared for them.
- 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.
- Concordances are frequently used as a tool in linguistics that can be used for the study of a text, such as:
- 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)