Konkordans

Konkordans is a reference work that lists the words of a text or body of texts in alphabetical order, providing the places where each word occurs and often including brief surrounding context. In its broad sense, a konkordans can be created for any language and any corpus, from a single literary work to large collections used in linguistic research. Traditional konkordans were printed volumes with word lists and citations; modern ones are usually digital databases or software tools that support advanced searching, lemma-based grouping, tagging, and frequency statistics.

Konkordans serve several purposes. They help scholars analyze word usage, track themes and terminology, aid translation, and support lexical and stylistic studies. They can be exhaustive, listing every occurrence in a corpus, or selective, focusing on particular word classes, forms, or contexts. They may be arranged by inflected forms or by lemmas, and often include metadata such as part of speech, root form, or morphological features. In practice, konkordans are used in biblical studies, literary analysis, historical linguistics, and applied language work.

Historically, konkordans emerged in the early modern period as scholars sought systematic indexes to texts, with notable Bible concordances such as Cruden’s and, later, Strong’s becoming influential. The term congruently derives from the Latin concordantia, reflecting the aim of showing all concordances or agreements of a word within a text.

Today, digital corpora and concordancers have largely supplanted printed editions, enabling rapid, large-scale queries across multilingual texts and providing tools for corpus linguistics, lexicography, and translation studies.

See also: Concordance, Lexicon, Corpus linguistics, Text search.