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“No competent scholar needs to be convinced of the utility of indices,” declared the University of Illinois “Czar of classics” and prodigious concordance producer William Abbot Oldfather in 1937, with only a little defensiveness. But then where have all the concordances gone today? Before the rise of a certain ubiquitous search engine, the humble index verborum (an alphabetical list of dictionary headwords used in a text, with a full list of citations for each instance) or concordance (same, but with a few words of context for each instance) were respected genres of scholarship. The work was tedious, though hardly easy or rote, given the many homographs and homonyms, especially in Latin. Concordances, dull though they may seem, helped Read more …