Concordancers Definition

A concordancer is a kind of search engine designed for studying language (corpus linguistics). If you enter a word or phrase, it looks through a large body of texts, called a corpus, a lists every single example of the word. Concordancers are a tools for corpus linguistics. Since most corpora (bodies of text) are incredibly large, it is a fruitless enterprise to search a corpus without the help of a computer.

What does a Concordancer do?

Concordance programs turn the electronic texts into databases which can be searched. Usually word queries are always possible, but most programs also offer the possibility of searching for word combinations within a specified range of words and of looking up parts of words (substrings, in particular affixes, for example). If the program is a bit more sophisticated, it might also provide its user with lists of collocates or frequency lists.

How can I use a Concordancer?

A concordancer lets you look at a word in context, see how common it is, see the style associated with it. Such a tool is a computer-specific tool that you may not be familiar with from learning English by more traditional ways, but it is worth spending some time experimenting with it and getting to know how to use it and harnessing its potential.

In addition to showing you a clear and objective picture of language use, it can help you with words that you are unsure of, which is of great use for grammatical words and, probably to a lesser extent with vocabulary. You can use it to compare your usage with that of native speakers or other learners and, once you get to know it quite well, you can use it to explore attitudes, the thought processes that lie behind the words.

The Concordance or results

The results are presented in a different way: instead of giving you a list of files or websites containing the search word or phrase, you'll get a list of phrases or sentences with the search word or phrase centred. This allows you to look for patterns, such as whether the word usually or frequently comes at the beginning of sentence or whether it is followed by certain words, like prepositions.

As an example, a search for 'involved' would quickly show that is often used with 'in' and 'with'. A closer examination of the examples would help you to find the reason why.

What do Concordancers search?

A Concordancer searches what is called a corpus (the plural is corpora), which is basically a database of language. There are many in existence, both general and specialised, although no corpus can be regarded as complete.

Do remember that concordancers are only as good as the database they are searching.