Manual - Context window

This search engine is a grep-based string tool, which means that you can use it in either intuitive og elaborate mode. If you are content with simple word searches, just type your text in the window and hit the "search"-button. If you want to run flexible searches, try some of the following:

. means 'any character, exactly 1'
? means '0 or 1 instances of preceding letter or expression'
* means '0 or more instances of preceding letter or expression, longest match'
*? means '0 or more instances of preceding letter or expression, shortest match'
+ means '1 or more instances of preceding letter or expression'
[] surrounds sets of characters
[^ ] surrounds sets of NOT-ed characters
() surrounds expressions
\w means a word character (alphanumeric), same as [a-zA-Z_0-9]
From this, you can build, for example:

[^ ] means 'any character but a space'
\w+ or [^ ]+ means 'any word'
[^\w] means a non-word character, including spaces, tabs and newlines [A-Z]+ means capital letters
[0-9]+ means numbers
[aeiou] means a vowel
[^aeiou ] means anything but a vowel and a blank
( [aeiou][^ ]+s)( [aeiou][^ ]+s)+[ ] means a sequence of 2 or more plural words with initial vowels
( ([gc][aeiou])[^ ]+)( \2[^ ]+)+[ ] finds you "gaelic" alliteration rhyms
\w(\w+)-\w\1, surrounded by single spaces, finds you lots of "willy-nilly"-constructions as well as some "cut-out" and "four-hour" cases. [a-z]([a-z]+))\-[a-z]\1 does the same, but avoids soccer results.
Remember spaces for word boundaries!

Try to force triple alliterations, as an exercise, and you will notice that complex searches will take a very long time, - especially if the server is serving many people at the same time. Thus the triple gaelic alliterations took about 7 minutes in a triple run on the BNC with its 600 MB of data

Remember that this search engine is sentence based, and will not transcend sentence window boundaries. In the initial concordance, you will be shown an 80-letter context from any sentence that matches your query, followed by a source-ID, consisting of the text segment (id), text type (n) and/or paragraph (p), as well as a sentence number (s) within the concerning segment. You can, however, - by clicking the sentence's radio button - add full sentence context "on demand" to be shown in the lower frame (context window). More running context is available by clicking on the rectangular id-buttons.