Dictionary of Old English Corpus: Searching for Phrases and Word Combinations

Dictionary of Old English Corpus: Searching for Phrases and Word Combinations

DOE Corpus

How to search the DOE Corpus for multiple words: phrases, word combinations, expressions. Includes regular expression and proximity searches.

Alexandra Bolintineanu

7-May-14

Welcome to the Dictionary of Old English Corpus. Old English is the earliest form of the English language, spoken and written between 600 and 1150 AD. The DOE Corpus contains at least one version of every known Old English text. So when you search the Corpus, you search almost every word of Old English in the world. This video shows you how to search the Corpus for combinations of words. Let’s start with two words that Modern English readily connects: the idiomatic expression ‘house and home,’ hus 7 ham in Old English. To search for this expression in the DOE corpus, simply type in “hus ham” in the search box. Alternatively, type in “hus”, select “AND” from the drop-down menu, and type “ham” in the search box that follows. This search will give you all seven Old English citations in which the words hus and ham appear—in any order. If you want your two words to appear in a particular order, you will have to use regular expressions. Regular expressions are a way of searching for a defined verbal formula: a formula that contains certain words in a certain order, but maybe other words in between. The syntax for regular expressions involves wildcards and slashes. The wildcards are ? and *. ? stands for any one character. * stands for nothing, a single character, or any number of characters. And if you put forward slashes (/) around an expression, you limit your search to citations that have those words in that very order. So if you look for /hus * ham/, you only get 4 citations in which hus and ham appear in the order you specified. Don’t forget the * between the two words, or else the // will be stripped off and you’ll default to the initial search for ‘hus 7 ham’ in any order. But what if you want to control your search even more closely? Suppose you want to search for two words that occur, not just in the same citation, but at a certain distance from one another? Then you have to do a proximity search. The proximity search has two steps. Step 1: Enter the two words only (no slashes, no asterisks) and run your search. Step 2: Below the Spelling Combinations, find the bar entitled ‘Proximity Distance.’ This determines how many words may be between your two search terms. With your mouse, grab the slider with the number on it and set it to the desired setting—let’s say “3.” Then click “Use the slider value.” To see the newly filtered results, click on each of the spellings under Spelling Combinations. You will now see only those citations which have three or fewer words between hus and ham. Note that the number next to each spelling combination measures how often that spelling combination occurs in the entire corpus, at the original proximity distance, not the new proximity distance you just selected. This video showed you advanced Corpus searches using combinations of words, regular expressions, and proximity searches. For more information, please see the DOE Help Manual. Happy searching with the Dictionary of Old English!