Concordancing is one of the most basic tasks in corpus inspection and analysis as it allows a selective and structured view on corpus data. The KWIC (key-word-in-context) concordance is probably the most widely-known and used type of concordance and is extremely useful as it offers the user a view of the data that can reveal interesting patterns underlying the context of occurrence of any lexical item. Concordancing is by no means a new approach to linguistic and textual data. The oldest concordances date back as far as the Middle Ages; the earliest specimen are hand-crafted concordances of the Bible. Later concordances of non-religious texts include for example concordances of important literary works such as the works of William Shakespeare. For a brief survey of the history of concordancing, see links below.

Among the software that allows users to query and inspect electronic corpora, programs that can generate concordances from a corpus based on user queries are probably among those users encounter early on in their corpus work. Concordancing software typically offers a variety of functions including most basically a query language allowing the user to query the corpus for single words or phrases, a functionality for creating word lists (alphabetical, frequency, reverse etc.), sometimes additional functions such as context or collocation query, key word analysis etc.

The following table offers a list of popular concordancing software that are discussed in these tutorials at various levels of detail.