concordances

A concordance is an alphabetical index of the principal words in a text, together with references to the passages where those words occur and often with brief surrounding context. The word comes from Latin concordantia, meaning agreement or harmony, from concordare, to agree.

Historically used in literary, biblical, and linguistic study, concordances can be exhaustive (listing every occurrence of a word form) or selective (highlighting notable uses). In biblical scholarship, widely used examples include Strong's Concordance and Young's Analytical Concordance to the Bible, which organize entries by lemma and provide verse references.

In contemporary linguistics and corpus studies, concordances are computer-generated indices that typically present a keyword in context (KWIC). They enable researchers to study word frequency, collocations, sense variation, and diachronic change by scanning large text collections rather than a single work.

Concordances serve editors, translators, lexicographers, and teachers by facilitating efficient location of word usage and analysis of language data. Their usefulness depends on the chosen corpus and indexing method; limitations include ambiguity and polysemy, as well as potential gaps in the underlying text. Despite these caveats, concordances remain foundational tools for textual analysis and language research.