How it Works
Internet Concordance Search is basically a look-up feature that you must set up in your word processor. Internet Concordance Search makes life easier for people who want to double-check what they have written.
Before we had fast internet access, we would have used a dictionary to check whether a phrase was correct. Now we can go to the internet and check whether it exists and how often it has been used.
For example, say you want to look up the phrase ten out of ten to double-check if this is idiomatic in English. You can go direct to your search engine results page from within your word processor.
Try it here: ten out of ten. For this phrase, you should get more than 100,000 reference links.
When translating or writing in your word processor, you select the text you want to look up and go to the internet by activating a macro you have set up in your word processor. You can instruct the macro to take your search query to a wide variety of websites:
- search engines: give you a list of links where the phrase or word is used
- online dictionaries: give you the definition, or use the phrase in examples, or give you a translation
- online encyclopedias: same as online dictionaries
- reference websites: for example, the websites of the European Union
- specialised glossaries: banking, insurance, technology, etc.
