WordSmith (software)
| Developer(s) | Mike Scott, Oxford University Press |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 1996 |
| Stable release |
7.0.0.100
/ April 28, 2016[1] |
| Operating system | Windows (Mac OS, Linux) |
| Size | 53.43MB |
| Type | Concordancer, Corpus manager |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | WordSmith Tools 6.0 |
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 handles many 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 was based on MicroConcord co-developed by Mike Scott and Tim Johns, published by Oxford University Press in 1993. Versions 1.0 through 4.0 were sold exclusively by Oxford University Press, the current version 7.0 and previous versions are now also distributed by Lexical Analysis Software Limited. The software runs under Windows. WordSmith is a downloaded-only product which is registered by entering a code costing 50 pounds sterling 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
