WordSmith

For other uses, see Wordsmith (disambiguation).

WordSmith Tools, in short, Wordsmith (which means 'word' and 'creator') is a paid software package primarily for linguists, in particular for work in the field of corpus linguistics. It is a collection of modules for searching patterns in a language. The software is also available in several languages.

Development and Acquisition

The program package was developed by the British linguist Mike Scott at the University of Liverpool and released as version 1.0 in 1996. It is based on the also co-developed by Mike Scott and in 1993 was first introduced concordance program "Micro Concord". Versions 1.0 through 4.0 were sold exclusively by Word Smith from the British Oxford University and the local Oxford University Press, the current version 5.0 and previous versions are now also distributed by the Lexical Analysis Software Limited. The current version of the software with the operating system from Windows can be used on a single computer or over a network 2000th. Under certain conditions, the software runs on an Apple operating system and Linux. Setting up the software on the computer is extremely simple without installer. Currently, the WordSmith Tools versions 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 as well as the narrower program MicroConcoord (no version upgrades with other names exist) are available. Wordsmith is acquired by downloading a self-extracting executable file for the time being as a demo version. This includes all the features of the full version, there are only 25 hits for a query and edited. The update to the full version by entering a code, which is a fee (online or written order) of the moment (October 2011), about 50 pounds sterling awarded for a single user license.

Functionality and Applications

The core areas of the software package includes three modules:

• Concord is used to create concordances, so all the hits from a search within a previously defined body text.
• WordList lists all the Words or on word forms that are included in the selected corpus and statistical data are different from the text corpus.
• KeyWord creates a list of all those words and word forms according to certain statistical criteria in the text corpus significantly occur rarely or frequently.

Each of the modules is offering a number of features available to certain other features of the analyzed text corpus. Thus, for example, collocation s given to the searched word forms, i.e. a collection (supplemented with a number of additional information) of those words created that occur together with the search word. In addition to this core offer are a number of additional modules that are useful for the preparation and reproduction of the text corpus. WordSmith Tools can be used in 80 different languages. WordSmith Tools is - along with several other software products similar in nature - an internationally popular program for the work based on corpus-linguistic methodology. Can be used in this type of software not only in the Theoretical linguistics, but also for example in the text linguistics media linguistics and discourse analysis, but also in some other, adjacent disciplines of linguistics. Such software is used, for example, to answer questions of use of certain words in certain syntactic structures, or the determination of content or meaning of certain expressions in certain texts or text places. This, among other things, certain patterns can be found in texts.

Reviews

• REVIEW OF MONOCONC PRO AND WORDSMITH TOOLS Language Learning & Technology Vol. 5, No. 3, May 2001, pp. 32–36

High impact papers which use WordSmith

• Comparing corpora with WordSmith tools: how large must the reference corpus be? Tony Berber-Sardinha Proceedings WCC '00 Proceedings of the workshop on Comparing corpora - Volume 9 Pages 7–13

References

External links

• Software website
• Step-by-step Guide to WordSmith Tools 6.0