A concordance is a comprehensive index of the words used in a text or a body of texts. Usually there are also citations of the passages in which the words occur.

Its simplest use is as an index, to locate quickly any passage in a text. All you need to know is one word from the passage: look up that word in a concordance to the text and you will find the passage.

But a concordance does much more than this. What you find when you look up any word is a gathering-together of all the usages of that word. Straight away you can compare all the contexts in which the word is used. This often enables special insights into the particular meanings of a text and into its characteristic language. For literary, legal, or philosophical texts, where language and meaning are primary concerns, the concordance is one of the most powerful investigative tools available.

A concordance will also show quickly how often any word is used. Just as significantly, it can show you what words are not used! Such features offer special insights into the issues or themes which are important or recurrent in a text - and they may not be quite what you expect!

However, concordances are not only for literary use. Computer programmers know them as cross-reference systems, which enable a team of people working on the same project to keep track of all the references to a particular entity (say, a variable name) across many files which make up the project. Organisations of all kinds can use concordances to provide rapid reference to internal information in any set of documents on an intranet. Something as humble as a series of minutes of meetings, for example, becomes much more powerful if all references to any topic can be seen instantly side-by-side. For more interesting material such as a set of related research papers the possibilities are even greater.

All the words used in the original text appear arranged alphabetically in a concordance. However, all the occurrences of any particular word (the citations for each headword), once gathered together, can be arranged in various ways. A common way is to follow the order of appearance in the original text. More revealing arrangements are sometimes possible. In my Concordance to the Poetry of Philip Larkin (Olms-Weidmann, 1995), for example, every word is accompanied by a note of the year in which it was used, so letting the reader follow the evolution of the poet's vocabulary.

A concordance doesn't do your thinking or investigating for you, any more than a computer does. You have to ask the right questions, you have to follow up your own hunches and insights. A concordance is a matchless tool for investigating texts. Its power is limited only by its user's imagination.

The first concordance, to the Bible, appeared in 1736. Its compiler was Alexander Cruden, born in 1701 in Aberdeen, Scotland, and a graduate of Marischal College, one of Aberdeen's two universities. His great work won him honour; until the later part of the twentieth century, concordances had to be compiled by hand.

A computer concordance can now be prepared relatively easily provided a suitable e-text is available. However, in practice a good deal of editorial work is required in the early stages if a reliable concordance is wanted, and to produce a concordance of a quality suitable for publication in book form is generally reckoned to take around 2000 hours.

Concordances are bulky, often eight, ten, or more times the size of the original text. It's easy to see why: if a line in the original text contains (say) eight words, that line will appear in the concordance once for each of those words: eight times in all. The Web Concordance System goes to considerable lengths to minimise delays when delivering concordances across the network.

Concordances sometimes omit certain high-frequency words in order to save space. Concordance-makers talk about the stop-list to mean the list of words which do not appear in the concordance. Words such as a and the are prime candidates for the stop-list. However, investigating the frequency of "function words" has proved to be a powerful tool in computational stylometry and the use of a stop-list may easily cause a concordance to lose its value to such investigators.

Further reading:
T.H. Howard-Hill, Literary Concordances (Oxford, 1979). An authoritative work on how to make a modern concordance.

Mail enquiries, suggestions, contributions to R.J.C.Watt@dundee.ac.uk

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