Frequently Asked Questions

1. About the Hyper-Concordance

1.1. What Bible translation is used, and why?

The Hyper-Concordance is based on the English Standard Version (ESV), a solid and readable modern translation which the good folks at Good News Publishing/Crossway Bibles have kindly allowed me to use. The ESV translators followed an 'essentially literal' translation philosophy: while each translation approach has its advantages, their word-for-word approach is a good match for the word-based Hyper-Concordance approach. Also, the ESV was available in OSIS format, which is likely to become a new standard for formatting Bible texts.

1.2. Do you have a version for the KJV/NIV/my favorite translation?

See the previous answer for why the ESV is used. I don't have the resources to do this for multiple translations, but the source code is freely available if you want to build your own (note you will need the text in OSIS format). If you do that, i'd appreciate a link to this version and a note to let me know about it.

If you prefer the Revised Standard Version, the previous version of the Hyper-Concordance is still available. However, it has some known bugs, and it is no longer maintained.

1.3. Can I start from a passage, rather than from a word?

Right now all the navigation is by words. I might add navigation by passage in a later version.

1.4. Why isn't the Old Testament included?

It's a practical issue in two dimensions. First, it takes a lot more processing/storage/management. But even more importantly, the size of the link pages becomes much less tractable for all but the most infrequent words. You could mitigate this with a more powerful interface that controlled the quantity of results that were shown: that goes beyond my limited skills and ambitions, however. Primarily, i see the Hyper-Concordance as an experiment in alternative navigation methods. It certainly does not reflect any disinterest on my part on the Old Testament, its content, or overall message.

1.5. Internet Explorer warns me about active content: is the Hyper-Concordance safe?

This warning comes from the use of javascript to vary font sizes: it's perfectly safe (but of course you have to take my word for it!). If you're concerned, you can view the javascript file here.

1.6. I use Internet Explorer for my browser, and the displays don't look quite right. What's wrong?

The problem here is that Internet Explorer versions 5 and 6 only incompletely support the Cascaded Style Sheet (CSS) standard. The CSS is right: IE's implementation of it, and therefore the display, is not. If you know enough about CSS to tell me how to support IE's deficiencies better, drop me an email and i'll be glad to try, provided it doesn't break standards-compliant browsers. This is one good reason (there are several others) to switch to a better browser like Firefox or Opera.

2. Word Forms (Morphology)

2.1. When I clicked on the word "loved", I got the page for "love". Is this a bug?

No, it's a feature. Plural nouns and inflected verbs are mapped to their root forms, under the assumption that you if you're looking for 'love' you want to find "loves", "loved", and "loving" as well.

2.2. When I clicked on the word "loved", I got the page for "love". Is this a bug?

No, it's a feature. Plural nouns and inflected verbs are mapped to their root forms, under the assumption that you if you're looking for 'love' you want to find "loves", "loved", and "loving" as well.

3. Bugs and Suspicions

3.1. Why isn't there an entry for "heaven"/"voice"/"light"/some other word?

The most frequent words have been omitted, particularly function words with little semantic content like pronouns and prepositions. There's a tradeoff between completeness and the space required for the Hyper-concordance: i felt these words wouldn't be missed, and it saves some space.

The complete list of omitted words is in the file stopwords.txt, which is included in the code.

3.2. The tooltip for the link to (some word) says there are (some number of) references, but only (some smaller number of) verses are listed. How come?

The count indicates how many instances of this word occur in all the verses: it's not a count of verses. 'eye' is a good example of a word that often occurs multiple times in the same verse.