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Word frequency search


Gary Pauley

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ok...so I want to search the words most frequently used in a book of the Bible...but I don't want articles and particles to show up (the, and, if, etc). I know I've seen how you do this, but can't find it again.

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You can accomplish this using the following search string (with All Text being selected under the More Options disclosure triangle):

 

?* @- [ARTICLE] @- [PARTICLE] <AND> [RANGE Matthew]

 

?* = Any word

@-[ARTiCLE] = that does not have a tag of "article"

@-[PARTICLE] = that does not (also) have a tag of "particle"

<AND> = and

[RANGE] = in this range (specify book, Matthew in the example above)

 

After you perform the search click on the Details button, select the Analysis tab, and choose Count Down for the Sort pop-up menu. The most frequently used words will be at the top of the list.

 

Note: This search finds the most frequently used words across the entire NT and displays only the hits confined to the book(s) you designated in the search string using the Range command. If you want to find vocabulary usage confined to a specific author, or confined to only a specific book you will need to define a custom range for such book(s) under the More Options section, instead of using the Range command.

 

Hope that helps.

 

Darryl

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There are a variety of ways to do this, depending on what you are specifically looking for. All of them will start with a * search for Words, we then can filter your results a bit. If you search for:

*@ [COUNT 1-5000]

 

this will not worry about the extremely common words, anything over 5000 hits.

 

If you search for:

*@-(the,and,but,of)

 

this will specifically exclude those words. So, you can provide whatever specific list of words you want ignored.

 

You could also do something like:

 

????*

 

which will find anything 4 letters or more. Of course, this removes some very important words, so probably isn't what you want.

 

Finally, if you do this in a grammatically tagged text, such as BHS-W4 or GNT-T, you can exclude by grammatical category. Here's one example:

 

*@-([ARTICLE], [CONJUNCTION])

 

 

Hope this helps!

 

Edit: Looks like Darryl beat me to the punch!

 

One addendum, I was rereading your post and you mentioned you wanted to search these most common words, not search for the most common words. First, you can exclude the more unique words with @-[COUNT 1-100] or whatever number is appropriate to only use the most common words. Secondly, if you want to then take these appropriate hits, I find it nice to make a new tab (duplicate with Command-D), and have it link to your first search with a [HITS ] command. This command takes all of the hit words of your first tab as the source words in your second. So you can then use those Hits in whatever way is appropriate. And if you need to refine how you received your most common words, you can easily refine that first tab still. If this is all confusing, I can provide screenshots.

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thanks guys...very helpful!

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  • 4 years later...

First, I purchased Accordance 11 yesterday just to make these kinds of searches, so I'm really new at Accordance (though I'm familiar with other Bible software). I need to determine which words I need to learn within particular ranges of texts. And, let's assume that I know my Hebrew words that are >50x in HB.

 

So, my ultimate query is which words occur in a passage, say, Exodus 19-40 that occur <50x in HB? What follows are problems I'm running into while trying to get at this information.

  1. I am not able to perform the searches as described in this thread. Whenever I try to type out the search commands for Hebrew Bible, the cursor is off to the right and I am limited to typing in Hebrew only. It seems that Accordance doesn't allow you to control input using OS X unicode Keyboards? I found the keyboard input within Accordance, but there's no "English" option that sends the cursor back to the left. (I can type in English if using brackets, etc. But it turns into a jumbled mess as the program doesn't know when to type English, Hebrew, or where the brackets should go (far left or far right of the string)).
  2. If I type the word search elsewhere and copy and paste it in, I do get some results. Here is my query for WORDS: ?* [COUNT 1-49] <AND> [RANGE Exodus 19-40]. However, the results don't seem accurate. For example, the results yield common words like אִם. Off to the right, it says "if (8)". Apparently, this word only occurs 8x within Exod 19-40––but MANY more than 50x in HB.
  3. Moreover, the concordance of this search lists every occurrence of the word within the HB. Toggling the option to "Search Range Only" does not change what is displayed. Accordance 11 is different enough from 10 that I can neither find the options I see in tutorials (or forums' screenshots) nor help to guide me to those options. Options like those that I see for Analytics in 10; specifically how to add and/or sort information.

Any help would be appreciated.

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In terms of #1, it is easiest when working with a Hebrew text to enter the search commands using the Search>Enter Command menu. Then they get entered properly.

 

In terms of #2, this search seems to work:

‏*@ ‎[COUNT 1-50]‎[RANGE Exodus 19-40]

Not that if it actually shows up in the search box in reverse order ([RANGE Exodus 19-40] [COUNT 1-50]@*)

I got it entered by typing *@ and then using the menu for the commands.

As for #3, it looks like this is a result of using the [RANGE] command in the search box, rather than the Range popup (which appears if you clidk the + button next to the search box). Unfortunately, COUNT is one of the few commands whose results differ depending on how you specify the range. Using COUNT plus RANGE in the search entry box looks for all those words in a certain range which occur with the specified frequency across the entire range of the text. Which is precisely what you want if I've understood you correctly. Using the range pop-up with COUNT gives you all words within that range that occur within the specified frequency within that range. (i.e. how many words occur 15-20 times in Exodus)

Limiting the results to the range when I use the pop-up to set range works. Limiting to range when I've used the RANGE command does not.

Lorinda

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Lorinda is precisely right, plus there are now a couple of improvements in v11

 

you don’t need the *@ for this.

 

if you use the menus or the keyboard shortcuts

 

just do RANGE (CMD-SHFT-R) and in the range command put Ex 19-40.

 

no <AND> is needed now for the RANGE command

 

then enter the COUNT command (CMD-SHFT-U) and in their type -50

 

your final search entry line should look like this

 

‏ ‎[RANGE Ex]‏ ‎[COUNT -50]‏

and viola - there are your results.
to get every word that occurs more than 50 times, you can enter +50 instead of -50.
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zmcox: It sounds as if you are trying to plunge into the more complex searches from the beginning. The quickest way to get you up and running is probably to have a short screenshare session and help you set up your searches. You can send me a PM with your Skype name and a time to call (not tonight) and I will be glad to help.

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