ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how concordances have developed since their first use several hundreds of years ago, how the results of searches through electronic corpora can be displayed, and how concordances can be read in order to find answers to questions about how language is used – in general and in particular. The first recorded concordance in the Western tradition was based on the work of Cardinal Hugo of St Caro, who, 'with the help of hundreds of Dominican monks at St James convent in Paris, compiled a word index of the Vulgate in the year 1230'. The first concordance examples looked at in the chapter was for single word-forms. While such searches can be very revealing, there are times when a researcher needs to move beyond individual word-forms. Thus, in many studies, it will be important to investigate a lemma rather than a simple word-form.
