As a writer, I have often known the mockery of the blank page. It glares at you, laughing at your struggles to fill it with something meaningful.

As Accordance users, we are constantly presented with a blank search box, ever ready to be put to use. Experienced users know exactly what to do with it, but new users may experience something of the mockery I feel when trying to fill a blank page. They may conceive of a search they would like to do, but how to construct it? They know Accordance is capable of much more than simple word and phrase searches, but how do they go about learning all the Boolean commands, wildcard symbols, and other tools that make such power-searching possible?

Thankfully, everything you need to fill in that blank search box—and I mean everything—is always readily available through one of the menus at the top of the screen. Can you guess which one?

As I'm sure you guessed, the aptly named Search menu presents you with everything you need to fill in the blank. Not sure what word to search for? Choose Enter Words…. Want to search a Bible with Key numbers for a particular key number? Choose Enter Key Numbers…. If your search text is a grammatically tagged Greek or Hebrew text, these menu items will appear as Enter Lexical Forms… and Enter Inflected Forms….

Beyond simply helping you enter words and key numbers, the Search menu also includes submenus listing every search command (AND, OR, NOT, etc.), every wildcard symbol, and (in the case of tagged texts) every grammatical and syntactical tag. You don't have to memorize these options or go digging through documentation even to realize they're available; just go to the Search menu and browse through the submenus. Not sure what a command or symbol does, but want to try it out? Simply select it from the menu to insert it into the search box.

By making all these options readily available, Accordance does its best to eliminate the potential mockery of the blank search box. And while there are still aspects of these commands and symbols which need to be learned, you always have them listed in a convenient place whenever you need them.

If you've never paid much attention to the Search menu, you now understand it's importance. Just remember to look there whenever you need help filling in the blank.

In yesterday's post, I offered you Greek students a method for garnering extra credit from your professors: Approach them on Friday and ask for extra credit if you spend the weekend finding all the hapax legomena in the Greek New Testament. Then do a simple search in Accordance, open an Analysis tab, and print! (Be sure to look tired and disheveled when you turn it in on Monday.)

Now, you Hebrew students could use extra credit too, so far be it from me to leave you out. Here's a search that is sure to impress your first semester Hebrew prof. In Hebrew, there's a class of verbs known as geminates. These are verbs in which the second and third letters of the lexical form are the same. Perhaps the most famous example would be הלל, "to praise." Why not ask your professor if you can spend the weekend putting together a list of every geminate verb in the Hebrew Bible? It sounds appropriately difficult—like the kind of thing only the most ambitious Hebrew student would attempt.

Now, to define this search, start by entering three question marks in the search entry box. The question mark, like the asterisk, is a wildcard symbol which can stand for any letter or number. Yet where the asterisk can represent any number of characters, the question mark can only represent a single character. For example, if I do an English search for love*, Accordance will find any word that begins with "love," no matter how many other letters it has: words like "loves," "loved," "lover," "lovers," "lovely," etc. If, on the other hand, I search for love?, Accordance will find only words that have a single letter after "love", such as "loves" and "lover." See the difference?

Because each question mark stands for a single character, whatever that character happens to be, entering three question marks into the search field means you want to find only three-letter words.

Now we need to specify that the third letter must be the same as the second letter. To do that, place parentheses after the third question mark. (Be sure to enter the right parenthesis followed by the left, since everything is reversed in Hebrew). Inside the parentheses, place an equals sign followed by the number 2. Your search argument should now look like this: (2=)???.

Placing parentheses after a question mark lets you specify which characters that question mark can be. For example, b?(ae)t will find "bat" and "bet," but not "bit" or "but," since we have specified that the question mark can only be an "a" or an "e." Returning to our Hebrew search, placing (2=) after the third question mark means that it can be any character, so long as it is the same character as that found by the second question mark. In other words, the second and third letters can be any letter, but they must be the same.

Now all we need to do is specify that the word we're searching for must be a verb. To do that, make sure the cursor is blinking to the right of the search argument, then choose Verb… from the Enter Command submenu of the Search menu. A dialog will appear enabling you to select specific grammatical details, but since we want to find any verbs, just click OK to dismiss the dialog. Accordance will then add the Verb tag to your search argument, and all you need to do is hit Return to perform the search.

As sophisticated as this search is, your results should be instantaneous. Now just choose Analysis from the Stats and Graphs icon to get an alphabetical list of all the geminate verbs in the Hebrew Bible, and print it out!

Just be warned: while this search may help you garner some extra credit, it may also raise your prof's expectations for you. You might find that he now treats you as a star pupil. And we all know what that means: you can probably count on getting called on more often in class!

Whenever I teach Accordance training seminars (I'll be doing two in Washington D.C. and Williamsburg next month), I get to show some really cool Greek and Hebrew searches. Because the seminar attendees can range from brand new users who don't know Greek and Hebrew to students taking their first class to Bible scholars who work with it every day, it can be challenging to show how some of the more esoteric searches are useful. So I sometimes will joke that the beginning students can use these searches to garner extra credit.

For example, in showing how to use the COUNT command, I'll search the tagged Greek New Testament for [COUNT 1]. (You'll find the COUNT command in the Enter Command submenu of the Search menu.) This powerful search finds every word which only appears one time in the Greek New Testament.

These rarely used words are known as hapax legomena, and in the days before Accordance, there was no easy way to find them.

Once we've done this search, I then have the seminar attendees select Analysis from the Stats & Graphs icon to get an alphabetized list of all NT hapax legomena.

All this takes no more than a few seconds.

It's then that I show the "practical" value of such a search. I tell all the beginning Greek students to approach their professor on a Friday and say, "Prof, if I spend the weekend finding all the hapax legomena in the Greek New Testament, can I get some extra credit?" Then I instruct them to go home, do the search and analysis I just showed, print out the analysis tab, and bring that in on Monday morning. If they really want to sell it, they should look particularly worn out and disheveled when they turn it in.

Now, this might have been more likely to work in the days before Bible software was capable of advanced research, but even today, it might work if your professor doesn't happen to use Accordance. If he uses something else, maybe he won't suspect that it only took you a few seconds!

Tomorrow, I'll give you Hebrew students a search you can use to garner extra credit.

In this series of posts, we've been exploring some of the 'ace' techniques you can use to define very precise original language searches. Here's what we've learned so far:

• Part 1: To search for a Greek lexical form, simply enter the word and hit return. To keep things simple and minimize mistakes, Accordance ignores breathing marks, accents, vowel points, and case—even if you happen to enter them.
• Part 2: To make sure Accordance uses breathing marks, accents, etc. to distinguish one lexical form from another with the same spelling (such as εἰς rather than εἷς), simply put an equals sign in front of the word.
• Part 3: Explained that when you search for a Greek word, Accordance assumes you are entering the lexical form of that word and that you want to find every inflected form of that lexical form.
• Part 4: To search for a particular inflected form rather than all inflections of a lexical form, simply put quotes around it.

In Part 4, we searched for "=εἷς", using both the quotes to indicate we were looking for an inflected form and the equals sign to make sure Accordance paid attention to the breathing mark and accent.

I then asked what would happen if we removed the equals sign and just used the quotes. In this post, I want to answer that question. My hope is that it will help cement in your minds the difference between the quotation marks and the equals sign.

Go ahead and remove the equals sign from the previous search so that your search argument looks like this: "εἷς". When you hit Return, you should see something like this:

Remember that we had set up an Analysis tab to list all the inflected forms beneath each lexical form. With this search, we have found every inflected form spelled epsilon-iota-sigma, regardless of its accent or breathing mark. The presence of the quotes tells Accordance we are searching for inflected forms, but the absence of the equals sign tells Accordance to ignore the accents, breathing marks, and case. Accordance therefore finds five different inflected forms from two different lexical forms—inflected forms which differ with respect to case, accent, and breathing mark.

Thus, if you're wanting to find an inflected form with a specific spelling and accentuation, you'll want to include both the quotes (to indicate inflected form) and the equals sign (to indicate that you want the accents considered).

Now, you need to understand that such a specific search might exclude some occurrences which are accented in an unusual way. For example, look at the inflected form εἴς in the screenshot above. Normally, the preposition εἰς does not take an accent, but in one case it does take an accent because it happens to be followed by an enclitic. I'll show you how to find that rare occurrence in my next post, but for now I want you to understand that searching for exact inflected forms by including both the quotes and the equals sign may exclude cases you may not want to exclude, such as when a form is capitalized, takes an iota subscript, or is otherwise accented in an unusual way.

This last point brings us back full circle to the reason Accordance ignores all that stuff by default: it's just too easy to miss something if you always have to consider every combination of case, accent, and breathing mark. So while Accordance gives you the tools to construct very precise searches, you don't need to know those 'ace' techniques in order to use Accordance effectively.

In yesterday's post, we did a search for the lexical form εἷς and showed the various inflected forms that were found. We explained that when you search for a Greek word, Accordance assumes you are entering the lexical form of that word and that you want to find every occurrence of that word no matter how it happens to be inflected. We saw that clearly when we customized the Analysis to list all the inflected forms beneath each lexical form:

Here we see that the lexical form εἷς occurs 345 times in a variety of forms. We also see that 96 of those times, the lexical form εἷς is actually inflected as εἷς, rather than as ἓν, μία, or some other inflection.

So what if you want to find a particular inflected form? How can you narrow your search so that it finds just the form you enter and no other inflections? Simply enclose your search term in quotation marks, like this: "=εἷς." When we perform this search, we find only the 96 occurrences of the inflected form εἷς.

So remember:

• To search for a Greek lexical form, simply enter the word and hit return.
• To make sure Accordance uses breathing marks and accents to distinguish one lexical form from another with the same spelling (such as εἰς rather than εἷς), simply put an equals sign in front of the word.
• To search for a particular inflected form rather than all inflections of a lexical form, simply put quotes around it.

Now, I want you to notice something about the inflected form search we just did. In this case, I used both quotation marks (to indicate an inflected search) and the equals sign (to make sure Accordance paid attention to the breathing mark and accent). Is the equals sign really necessary here? What would happen if we removed it?

I'll answer that question in my next post.

In my last couple of posts, I've been showing you how to become a searching 'ace' by searching for the Greek word εἰς. You see, there is another Greek word spelled exactly like εἰς except for the breathing mark and accent: εἷς. As I explained in the first post in this series, Accordance ignores breathing marks, accents, vowel points, and case even if you happen to enter them in your search. We do this to spare you having to get all those things right in order to do a basic search, but what if you want Accordance to pay attention to those things? In my second post, I showed that you merely need to enter an equals sign before the word in question to have Accordance consider breathing marks, accents, vowel points, and case. At the end of that post, we searched for =εἰς to find only εἰς without also finding εἷς.

In this post, I want to show you another little wrinkle. Let's start by doing the opposite of what we did last time. Let's enter =εἷς to find only the occurrences of that word. When the search is finished, choose Analysis from the Stats and Graphs pop-up to open the Analysis tab. You should now see something like this:

As you can see from the Analysis tab, this search found only the 345 occurrences of εἷς. Yet if we look at the highlighted words in the Search tab to the left, we don't see the form εἷς at all. Instead, we see words like ἓν and μία.

This is because the lexical form εἷς takes a variety of inflected forms to indicate things like gender, number, and case. If you look down at the Instant Details in the screenshot above, you can see that ἓν is the neuter singular nominative of εἷς.

This distinction between "lexical forms" and "inflected forms" is important. Basically, a lexical form is the form of a word you would typically look up in a Greek lexicon: such as the nominative singular of most nouns or the present active indicative of most verbs. When you enter a Greek word in the search entry box, Accordance assumes that you are entering a lexical form and that you want to find every occurrence of that lexical form, no matter how it happens to be inflected.

To see how many different ways the lexical form εἷς is inflected in the Greek New Testament, go to the gear menu of the Analysis tab and choose Customize Display.

This will open a dialog that lets you decide exactly what information you want the Analysis to display.

The columns in the middle of this dialog represent each word in your search. Note how they all contain the LEX item. That's why the Analysis defaults to listing every lexical form found by your search. To have the Analysis list other criteria, you simply drag the desired items into the appropriate column. Since we only searched for one word, only the first column applies here, so we'll drag an INFLECT item into the first column underneath the LEX item.

When we click OK, the Analysis will now show every inflected form that was found underneath each lexical form.

Again, be sure you understand the distinction between lexical and inflected forms. The lexical form is the dictionary form of the word which represents every inflected form. Thus, the lexical form εἷς occurs 345 times in a variety of forms. From the Analysis we see that 96 of those times, the lexical form εἷς is actually inflected as εἷς, rather than as ἓν, μία, or some other inflection.

Now, what if we want to narrow our search so that it finds only those 96 occurrences of the inflected form εἷς? How do we do that? I'll answer that question in my next post.

In yesterday's post, I wrote that if you know how to search for εἰς, you're well on your way to being a searching "ace." It was an admittedly nerdy pun, since the Greek word εἰς is pronounced like the English word "ace." I'm feeling a little less nerdy today, however, since someone made the even nerdier observation that my pun only works for the artificial Erasmian pronunciation scheme as opposed to other systems!

Whether or not my joke works in your preferred system of Greek pronunciation, my point is that searching for εἰς offers a great opportunity to learn some important aspects of searching in the original languages. As I pointed out yesterday, a search for epsilon-iota-sigma actually finds both εἰς and εἷς, two words which are spelled the same but have a different breathing mark. Yet even when we included a smooth breathing mark to search specifically for εἰς, our search still gave us both εἰς and εἷς. That's because Accordance actually ignores breathing marks, accents, vowel points, and even upper or lowercase for purposes of searching.

But what if you don't want those things to be ignored? What if you really want to be able to find εἰς without also finding εἷς?

Here's the secret: whenever you want Accordance to pay attention to breathing marks, accents, vowel points, and case, simply enter an equals sign (=) before the word you're searching for, like this:

Notice that with the equals sign before εἰς, the number of hits drops from 2112 to 1767. Likewise, the Analysis shows that εἰς is the only lexical form that was found, and εἷς has been excluded.

So to become an ace at original language searching, remember the lesson of εἰς: use the equals sign to make Accordance pay attention to breathing marks, accents, vowel points, and case.

In my next post, we'll try to search for εἷς, and I'll give you a few more ace searching tips.

Εἰς in the title of this post is a Greek preposition which is pronounced like the English word ACE. It's an admittedly nerdy joke, but searching for εἰς helps to illustrate several important aspects of original language searching in Accordance. In other words, if you know how to search for εἰς, you're well on your way to being a searching "ace."

So if you have a tagged Greek New Testament text, open it up, select Words from the Words/Verses token, and type the letters "e, i, s." When you're finished, hit return to perform the search. Your search tab should then look like this:

Notice that we didn't have to enter the smooth breathing mark or any accents for this search to work. All we needed to do was enter the letters.

So far things have been pretty simple, but there's more to this search than meets the eye. To see what I'm talking about, click the Stats and Graphs icon (the one that looks like a bar chart just to the right of the number of hits) and choose Analysis.

An analysis window will open listing all the words that were found by our search:

Note that this search for words spelled epsilon-iota-sigma actually found two words: εἰς (with a smooth breathing mark and pronounced like 'ace') and εἷς (with a rough breathing mark and pronounced like 'hace'). These are two very different Greek words which, with the exception of the breathing mark, are spelled exactly the same way. Because we didn't enter the breathing mark, Accordance found both.

But what if we only want to find εἰς without also finding εἷς? Well, let's try just including the breathing mark in our search entry to distinguish the one from the other. The easiest way to do this is to copy εἰς from the Analysis window (the second word listed) and then paste that into the entry box of our Search tab. When you do that, you get the following result:

Do you see the difference? That's right, there isn't one. Even though we included the breathing mark in this second search, Accordance still found both of these homographs (a fancy term for words which are written the same way).

So here's the first thing you have to understand about Accordance original language searches: even if you enter a breathing mark, an accent, or a vowel point in Hebrew, Accordance totally ignores them. It's the same way with capital letters and apostrophes in English. Accordance ignores those details to give you the words that match the letters you entered.

Why would we ignore things like breathing marks, accents, vowel points, and case? Primarily because we don't want to require you to get that level of detail right in order to perform a successful search. A new student of Greek would be lost if a search failed because he or she entered a grave accent rather than an acute. Heck, even an expert in the languages might get annoyed if they had to show that level of care in entering a search argument. So Accordance simply ignores all those details unless you specifically tell it to take them into consideration. In tomorrow's post, I'll show you how to do just that. That way you'll know how to distinguish εἰς from εἷς, and be well on your way to becoming an Accordance searching 'ace.'

Accordance searching has always been about precision. When you enter a word or phrase, that exact entry is found. Your search results are not cluttered with approximate hits. You simply find what you're looking for.

Unfortunately, that level of precision can be a bit of a double-edged sword—especially when you don't know exactly what you're looking for.

Now, Accordance has always had built in ways to broaden a search and make it more flexible, such as wildcard symbols, search commands, and fuzzy searches; but using those techniques requires a level of expertise that is becoming less common among new Accordance users. When Accordance started, the average computer user was comfortable using wildcards and Boolean commands, but the post-Google generation has no desire to bother with that stuff.

Wouldn't it be nice if Accordance offered an option to find what you want even if it's not exactly what you enter? For example, wouldn't it be nice if you could enter something like seek find and end up with a result like this?

Hmmmm. It sure would be nice.

The other day I showed how you can hide any highlighting you've done to avoid being distracted by it. Today I want to show you how to find any highlighted verses—even when you've chosen to hide the highlighting.

To search for highlights, select Style from the Enter Command submenu of the Search command. Replace the selected question mark inside the Style command with the name of the highlight style you want to find. In my first post in this series, I defined a highlight style to tag verses with the label "Joy," so I'll simply type "joy" to replace the question mark. (Actually, since none of my other highlight styles start with the letter "j", simply typing a "j" would be sufficient. Accordance only needs enough of a style name to distinguish it from all other style names.)

When I hit Return to perform this search, all of my "joy" verses will appear. Even though I had Hide verse highlighting checked in the text display settings, Accordance automatically unchecks that setting for the purpose of displaying the results of a Style search.

You can even use other commands and search criteria in combination with the Style command. For example, let's say I want to search all my "Joy" verses for the phrase "in the Lord." I'll simply add an AND command (by choosing it from the Enter Command submenu of the Search menu or using the keyboard shortcut shift-command-A) followed by the phrase "in the Lord" (the quotes are unnecessary). Here is the result:

As you can see, using your highlight styles as the basis for a search can make it easy to search only your "tagged" verses.