How to use the keyword in context concordance
- Paste the text and type the word or phrase to find.
- Choose how many words on each side to show, from 1 to 20.
- Choose how to sort the lines: by place in the text, by the words after the match, or by the words before it.
- Read the count and the table of lines, and download the table as a CSV if you want to study it elsewhere.
Formula
words = runs of letters and numbers, with apostrophes and hyphens allowed inside a word
a match = the phrase words appearing one after another
line = up to N words before + match + up to N words after
Matching ignores capital letters unless you ask for an exact match. Punctuation is dropped from the context, so lines read as plain runs of words.
A famous opening paragraph
In the starting text, the word "of" occurs 10 times in 60 words, about 166.7 per thousand words. The first line reads "It was the best / of / times it was the", and the second "it was the worst / of / times it was the".
Searching for the phrase "age of" with 2 words on each side and sorting by the words after finds two lines. They sort as "foolishness it" before "wisdom it", because f comes before w. Sorting "times" by the words before puts "best of" before "worst of", which groups the contexts alphabetically by the word nearest the match.
What a concordance shows
A keyword in context list lines up every use of a word with its neighbors. That makes patterns in use easy to see: which words come before it, which come after and whether it is used in one sense or several. Linguists use it to study meaning, and writers use it to check how a word or term is used across a long document.
Sorting by the first word after the match groups lines that continue the same way, and sorting by the word before groups lines that start the same way. Try both for the same word to see different patterns.
Related checks
To see which words are used most overall, use the Word Frequency Counter. To find words repeated too close together, use the Repeated Word Finder. The Word Counter gives length statistics and the Text Similarity Calculator compares two texts. All of them run in your browser.
Assumptions and limits
- The text can be up to 1,000,000 characters, and up to 500 lines are listed (the count shows all matches).
- A phrase must appear as consecutive words. Hyphenated words count as single words.
- Context lines are made of words only, so punctuation and line breaks in the original are not kept.
- Everything is processed in your browser and nothing is stored or sent.
Frequently asked questions
Can I search for a phrase?
Yes. Type two or more words and the page finds places where those words appear next to each other, in that order. Capital letters are ignored unless you tick the exact match option.
Why is there no punctuation in the lines?
The context is built from words so that every line shows the same number of words on each side. This keeps the lines aligned and easy to sort. Look up the line number in your own text for the original punctuation.
What counts as a word?
A run of letters and numbers, which may contain apostrophes and hyphens inside it. So don't and well-known are single words, and a number such as 2024 is also a word.
Does it find parts of words?
No. The search matches whole words only. A search for "cat" does not match "category" or "concatenate".