Concordance: analyzing a body of sample language (a corpus) to determine common usage
Often people do concordance to find out the common collocation of a word with other words, or the frequency of collocation of two or more words. The tools below are a starting point for your explorations of concordance.
1. Fantastic! Three great concordance samplers which can access the biggest and most famous corpuses (including the British National Corpus):
http://www.lextutor.ca/conc/eng/
British Academic Written English concordancer
https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/corpus/first_form?corpname=preloaded/bawe2
British Academic Written English Corpus
http://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/research-directories/current-projects/2015/british-academic-written-english-corpus-bawe/
2. Google Ngram Viewer for addictive data-based usage comparisons.
Watch the settings at the top!
https://books.google.com/ngrams/
Ngram Viewer about page
https://google.research/blog/ngram-viewer-20/
3. Make your own concordance! Laurence Antony at Waseda University made Antconc, a free software for making your own concordance.
http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software.html
4. Google can be a simple concordancer too:
http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/2012/06/21/how-to-solve-impossible-problems-daniel-russells-awesome-google-search-techniques/
5. Speaking of googling, if you google stuff, this demo by a google engineer is not to be missed:
https://johntedesco.net/blog/2012/06/21/how-to-solve-impossible-problems-daniel-russells-awesome-google-search-techniques/
6. Arcane concordancing: Here’s an example of an informal concordance exploration of the context of usage of a word.
Lawrie Hunter 