Concordancer for Windows aka WConcord is a concordancing software developed at the Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies at TU Darmstadt by Prof. Dr. Leslie Siegrist and his team in collaboration with Zdenek Martinek from the University of West Bohemia, Pilzen, Czech Republic. While it was developed and released in the late 1990s, it still works under current versions of Windows, for example, it has been tested successfully under Windows 10 Pro.

The tool is made available here for historical purposes to document the development and evolution of corpus and computational linguistic software. It works, but has been superseded by more modern programs that will visually and sometimes also functionally appeal more to the user of the 2020s. Having said that, it has some unique features that are explained further down on this website. The tool is still available and can be downloaded from this page here. It is delivered as a single executable file called WConcord.exe. There is no installation process and it does not make any changes to your system. As a matter of fact, it can also be run from any portable or pen drive. Being lightweight and easy to install was a driving design principle as WConcord was designed to be and in fact was being used in diverse scenarios in schools and universities, by teachers, students and interested linguists in many different countries.

Concordancer for Windows enables users to search for words in text files and display them in the form of concordances. Concordances can be used for text analysis including the investigation of style, grammar usage, vocabulary usage and teaching.

The program has been designed so as to be very easy to use for those who have had little or no previous experience with computers.

Hardware and software requirements: PC Pentium / 133 MHz or higher, at least 4 MB RAM, VGA, Windows 95 or higher. The latest version of the program is Freeware.

Before you can start searching, you must specify a list of files to be searched through. Then you can create concordance lists by specifying criteria for the search. The concordance list can be sorted according to various criteria. You can also copy selected lines from a concordance list to a clipboard or to a text file, and you have the possibility to select a form for the list. You can remove duplicate sentences from the list and easily jump to the source text from where the extracted sentence comes. You can save the list of file names to a disk as a corpus or subcorpus for later use. WConcord also enables the extraction of raw data tables for modelling the frequency distribution of tokens in context.

More detailed instructions on how to use WConcord and a functional description will appear here shortly.

WConcord as of version 3.0 is freeware. You can download the executable file here and save it to a drive and directory of your choice and execute the file. No installation is required and WConcord consumes minimal disk space and resources. This even works from a portable or pen drive.

WConcord download

Enjoy!