Best way to use Lexicons?

[kevinplarson]

How do you guys use them? Back when I used Bibleworks, I set them up for auto-info at the bottom. Can you do that here? How can you search them the easiest? I'm not finding it too easy to figure out.

[Joel Brown]

How do you guys use them? Back when I used Bibleworks, I set them up for auto-info at the bottom. Can you do that here? How can you search them the easiest? I'm not finding it too easy to figure out.

 

I'm not fully familiar with Bibleworks' capabilities, but I think you have plenty of good options in Accordance.

 

As you may have noticed in Accordance, simply mousing over a word gives its grammatical information in the Instant Details box. To switch to displaying a specific lexicon, just hold down the Command key. It will show the results of your top lexicon in each category (Greek vs. Hebrew vs. English).

 

To search for it and show it in the context of your favorite lexicon, just triple-click any word.

 

If you want to search for it in any other lexicon, just select the word or put your cursor inside it, then select the lexicon from the Resource Palette on the right. This will do an 'Amplify' and search whichever lexicon you select. This is quite powerful, as you can search the 'wrong' field, such as searching your commentary for a greek word, or searching your lexicon for a reference, or searching Anchor-Yale BD for transliteration.

[jpkang]

Just to follow up on Joel's post, if the floating Instant Details window is not showing, go to the Window menu and choose it (or press cmd-opt-3 to toggle it). Also, there are lots of options for configuring what gets displayed by default in the preferences, including a "Cheshire cat" effect "Set to automatically fade."

[dgzylstra]

I'm finding that having a "My Groups" "Lexica" group set up is very helpful. Then you can easily highlight any word you want to look up and amplify to that word using all the lexica that you have at once. Either that or you can do a "Search All" of those same resources. Not as quick as the "instant details window, but more thorough.

[kevinplarson]

This is great stuff. I've found when I search my Greek stuff it doesn't bring results. Do I have to search on the root or something?

[Joel Brown]

Can you tell me exactly what you are doing that produces no results?

[dgzylstra]

This is great stuff. I've found when I search my Greek stuff it doesn't bring results. Do I have to search on the root or something?

 

If you do a "Search For" by right clicking on the word in question, then you're presented with the option to look for the "Lemma, Inflected, or Root" forms of the word. That will only get you other hits on that word in the text in question--more times when the word is used in the scriptures you're looking at.

 

That's not what I meant when I suggested amplifying or looking up the words in question through a "My Group" set of lexica. If you just want to look the word up in your favourite dictionary, then simply make sure that dictionary is at the top of your list of dictionaries in the Library Palette, and then right click on the word and choose "Look Up", then "Dictionary" -- this will get you to the one dictionary that is set as the default for that work in Accordance.

 

If, however, you want to look up that word in all your lexica, then one way to do that would be to create the "My Group" with the resources you want in it. Then, in your text pane, select the word you want to look up. Next, move the mouse to your "Resource Palette", click and hold on the Magnifying glass icon and choose your group of lexica from the drop down menu that you see. If you need more detailed info about how to do this, I believe there are some great tutorials on the blog that have been posted recently.

[RobM]

I'm finding that having a "My Groups" "Lexica" group set up is very helpful. Then you can easily highlight any word you want to look up and amplify to that word using all the lexica that you have at once. Either that or you can do a "Search All" of those same resources. Not as quick as the "instant details window, but more thorough.

 

I do something a bit different.

 

For my NT Studies workspace, I have of my Greek Lexicons saved as tabs. (Background set-up: I have BDAG arranged as my first Grk lexicon in the Library Window). One is BDAG, the next is Louw & Nida, and the third is Spicq. In the search lines of the latter two, I have entered (and saved) the Link command to link to BDAG: [LINK BDAG-NT Studies] (What you see in the square brackets is what I've named the BDAG tab). This way, whenever I triple click on a word in GNT-T, Accordance looks for the word in BDAG, then the Link commands make the other two lexicons perform the exact same search in it. And it does this all automatically!

 

Now, I am more of an OT guy and I have five Hebrew lexicons. I have each of these set to Link to Halot (my first Hebrew lexicon in the Library Window). Having all these lexicons search for the word automatically and immediately is awesome! All I have to do is navigate among the tabs and read and look at whatever I need to.

 

Hope this helps. Let me know if my explanation was not clear.

[kevinplarson]

Thanks for all your help, friends!