Sunday, March 29, 2009


At first, the term "concordance" sounded somewhat like Greek to me! Another funny thing that would make you laugh till you twist your belly is the fact that I assumed concordance as a type of "dance", since I am rather curious to explore various sorts of dance lately! However, after several attempts of analyzation and thorough reading, the whole idea of concordance finally hit into my head. Well, for those who are still unable to digest this term, below is the definition to it and its related terms.

Concordance: An alphabetical list of the words in a book or a set of books which also says where each word can be found and often how it is used.

Concordancer: A concordancer is a computer program that automatically constructs a concordance.

Concordancing: (Not a type of dance for sure!) but simply an act of concordance.

KWIC: KWIC is an acronym for Key Word In Context, the most common format for concordance lines.

A corpus: either just one text or a collection of texts.


In this scenario, most of us would relate this as to how a software like such could be helpful to teachers of languages. Well, here's why:

  • The teacher can use a concordancer to find examples of authentic usage to demonstrate features of vocabulary, typical collocations, a point of grammar or even the structure of a text

  • The teacher can generate exercises based on examples drawn from a variety of corpora, for example gap-filling exercises and tests.

  • Students can work out rules of grammar or usage and lexical features for themselves by searching for key words in context. Depending on their level, they can be invited to question some of the rules, based on their observation of patterns in authentic language.

  • Students can be more active in their vocabulary learning: depending on their level, they can be invited to discover new meanings, to observe habitual collocations, to relate words to syntax, or to be critical of dictionary entries.

  • Students can be invited to reflect on language use in general, based on their own explorations of a corpus of data, thus turning themselves into budding researchers.


Most may say that concordance is a tool in linguistics only, but the fact is when concordance is effectively implemented it can do much more than what is really assumed. Understanding and using concordance in a database will provide more comforts. Especially languages that are developing in computing field now can utilize this facility more effectively. More refined and object oriented tasks can be made by the use of concordance. General uses of a concordance are,

  • Comparing different usages of the same word

  • Analyzing keywords

  • Analyzing word frequencies

  • Finding and analyzing phrases and idioms

  • Creating indexes and word lists

Uses of Concordance in Language computing can vary largely. For example:

  • Developing tools for searching

  • Effective adoption of vocabulary

  • Developing a very effective database in regional languages

  • Very accurate and faster searching and listing of required.

  • Can change the methods of search engines in regional languages

  • Can be used in Machine Translation

  • Can be used in Spelling and Grammar tools as a back end

To my extent of knowledge, concordance has done wonders to reduce the burden of people who would wish to analyze a context word by word (these people I am referring to are mainly Linguists and others related to Language). In ancient times, one would probably have to anaylze word by word manually where he would have to analyze each and every word provided in a text. With the help of concordance softwares, now we are able to analyze a whole context (no matter how lengthy it may be) in a tick before a tock! For example, counting the frequency occurence of a word can be a real hassle (imagine a context of a thousand pages) but a concordance software can easily finish your job in a fraction of time. However, concordance can only analyze words and phrases that can be done grammatically, almost close to a word processor. The reasons of different usages of words, grammatical errors and probably other methods of study can only be performed by us humans. Hence, it can only help one analyze the occurence and not its characteristics (despite grammatically). The picture below may give one a clearer view of how exactly this software works.


Nevertheless, one can still download free versions of concordance softwares online such as antconc for a good explore of this software. Below is a link to concordancesoftware which allows us to download a free version of concordance (Concorde 3.20 - the software in the image above). Once you are done downloading the software, simply click on file menu to attach a context of words and be surprised as to how this software can actually help us analyze words in depth. Also, do not fail to visit the links below to obtain more information on concordance, its benefits and how it really works! (The latter focuses on various topics that are related to concordance, mainly those related to language learning, language awareness, and activities on concordance).


  1. Ok very informative and I'm glad now you know it is not a type of dance! Keep up the good work sheela.