The OnLine Works of Robert Burns

What Is A Concordance?

A concordance is a special kind of index in which all the words used in a piece of literature are listed along with the place(s) used.

Concordances are very useful tools for scholars because they make research into an author's works easy. Concordances are available for many works of literature. One famous concordance was compiled for the Bible.

Prior to the advent of computers, compiling a concordance was a difficult manual procedure. Concordances were rare and expensive, and usually found only in the largest research libraries. Compiling a concordance with a computer becomes a relatively simple job, assuming that the literary work has already been converted from a printed document into an electronic format the computer can process. A rather simple computer program can be written to construct a database of words and their references.

How Does Our OnLine Burns Concordance Work?

The Concordance provided on our website was constructed by the program that also created the indices by title, first line, year and genre. Each word was added to a database along with the name of the poem or song in which it appeared. The database was used to create 26 HTML pages (one for each letter in the alphabet), with the words listed alphabetically along with links to the poems or songs.

In order to keep the Concordance from growing too large, we filtered out trivial words. These are words that occur so commonly that each reference would require listing all or most of the titles.

To find the poems or songs that contain a given word:

• Click on Concordance in the main index bar.
• Click on the desired letter of the alphabet. The concordance will look like this:

• Scroll down through the listing until you find the word of interest. Remember to check for alternate and/or non-standard spellings (e.g. luve as a variation on love).
• Click on the title of the poem or song you want to examine.
• You can use your browser's Search or Find tool to locate the specific instances of the word you are looking for.

Hints On Using the Concordance

• If you are looking for a specific phrase, pick an uncommon word in the phrase for your Concordance search. For example, to find the phrase:
  Great Chieftan o' the Pudding-Race

  search on Chieftan or Pudding. The search on Chieftan yields:

  Chieftain

  Address To A Haggis
  Epistle From Esopus To Maria
  Here's A Health To Them That's Awa
  

  The search on Pudding yields:

  Pudding

  Address To A Haggis
  Pudding-race
  Address To A Haggis

  Address to a Haggis is the poem that contains this phrase, and it can be located quite easily by using the Concordance.

• Make sure you also check alternate and non-standard spellings for words.

• The Concordance pages are large. Some are nearly 200K of HTML code. Be patient waiting for them to load. One of these days we'll come up with a more efficient scheme for organizing the Concordance, but for now please bear with us.