concordantie

Concordantie, or concordance, is a reference work that lists occurrences of words within a text or set of texts, usually with citations to where the words appear and often with brief contextual quotations. Its primary purpose is to enable precise location, frequency analysis, and examination of how language is used, supporting tasks in translation, exegesis, and corpus research.

A concordance typically presents an alphabetical list of headwords. For each headword it provides references to the occurrences (such as book, chapter, and verse, or page numbers) and often a short extract showing the word in context. Some editions also record the lemma or root form and may link to dictionaries or grammatical notes. In English Bible studies, widely used tools include concordances that connect Hebrew or Greek terms to glosses or numerical codes, aiding cross-language study.

History: Concordances have a long scholarly tradition that grew with print culture. The Bible prompted extensive development of concordances for exegetical and translational work, beginning in the late medieval and early modern periods. In modern times, highly influential works such as Strong’s Concordance (late 19th century) organized entries around lexical roots with numerical references. Today, many concordances are produced automatically from digital corpora.

Types:

- Biblical concordances: indices to biblical texts by word form and context.

- General linguistic concordances: indices focused on specific authors, genres, or corpora.

- Reverse concordances: show contexts for a given word or lemma rather than listing by headword.

- Morphology-based or lemma-based concordances: group related inflected forms under a common lemma.

Limitations: concordances reflect form-based indexing and may underrepresent nuances of meaning; accurate tokenization and disambiguation are essential, and polysemy or cross-language variation can complicate interpretation.