Concordance query

[Alistair]

Is there a way to find out how many unique words are in any given text?

 

The analysis gives the total number of words used, but what I want to know is how many of them are unique.

[Ruben Gomez]

Yes, there is

 

You can do it in a number of different ways, depending on your needs.

 

First, you can do a full text search (with the asterisk), and use the Concordance button. In the Concordance window you will see how many times each word appears.

 

Secondly, you can follow the same process (i.e., search the full text range) and use the Analysis window to see the number of instances each word is contained in the search text. The information displayed in the Analysis window is highly customizeable.

 

Thirdly, you may use the [COUNT] stand-alone command to specifiy the number of times a term must appear (if you look for hapax legomena, then your count value would be 1). You will probably want to use this command together with [RANGE], so as to limit the search to any given temporary range of verses. When you run the search, it will return all the unique words you are after.

 

You can find out more about this last approach in chapter 8 (pages 6-7) of the User's Guide.

 

Hope this helps.

 

(Update: Upon closer reading, If I am understanding what you're asking, I think what you need is the COUNT command)

[Helen Brown]

You may want see this post Finding Hapax which is the scholars' way of saying "a word that occurs only once in the text."

[Alistair]

Hi,

 

First I had forgotten I had posted this question, so apologies for the delay in coming back.

 

 

What I want to do is to compare Bible translations, so I could say, for example:

 

The KJV uses 900 unique words but the NEB use 1235, so the NEB is a more educated or literary translation, etc...

 

I can find out how many total words are given in any translation, but I want to know the number of unique words. I am not searching for hapax legomena. I don't think the count command will help me, from what I have read.

 

Thanks!

 

~Alistair

[Helen Brown]

Just look in the Analysis window after you search the text for Words and use an asterisk: the Number of different forms is listed, e.g. for the KJVS it is 13761.