Well, I received my copy of Accordance in the mail the other day, and I have been playing around with it quite a bit. One of the things I’ve learned to do, that will certainly help me in my reading of the Greek New Testament, is the ability to produce a given vocabulary list for a particular segment (up to 200 verses at a time). As I go through my class on 2 Corinthians, I thought that this would be a great opportunity to use it. Here’s how to do it using words that occur 30 times or less:

1. Open up your GNT module
2. Type “[COUNT 1-30] [RANGE 2 Cor 1]” without the quotation marks into the search (search for: must have “words” selected).

While this particular search is pretty understandable, I’ll go ahead and explain what is going on. the [COUNT 1-30] function will retrieve every word that is found in the GNT 30 times or less. If you want to do the search for words occurring 10 times or less, you would change it to [COUNT 1-10]. The [Range] function sets the parameters for which part of the GNT is returned in the results. As you can see here, I’ve limited the results to the first chapter of 2 Cor. Here is the result:

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The words which occur 30 times or less appear in red. So what are we to do with that? Well, let’s continue.

3. Click somewhere in the text window, and hit command-a to select all the text.
4. Click on the parsing tool to bring up parsing information for every word in the specified range. At this point we still have way more information then what we are wanting:

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This has parsed every word in the selected text (2 Corinthians 1). So how do we reduce it to those words which are 30 times or less (our targeted vocabulary list)?

5. Hit command-t to bring up the “set parsing display” dialogue box.
6. There are a couple parameters to set here:
Parse: Set to “hit words only” – this limits the list to words fitting the [count] function
Show: Make sure only “lexical form” and “gloss” are checked.
7. Click Ok. Voila! Here is the list for 2 Cor 1:

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All that’s left to do is File>Save As Text File

This can be done for every chapter, or to speed it up a bit, every couple of chapters at a time. Whenever I am studying a chapter for the class, all I have to do is consult my text files as I’m reading and rereading that chapter if I come to a word I don’t know. Hey, maybe I’ll write my own Greek Reader… yeah, probably not.