by Harry Hahne

Search Capabilities

TheWord possesses flexible search options. Boolean searches use AND, OR, NOT and XOR operators. Parentheses can be used to group search expressions, such as "God (man woman)." Wild cards can be placed at the beginning and end of words, but not in the middle. There is a limit of 300 matching words for wild cards. A search for an expression that results in too many matching words, can crash the program without an error message! One can search for an exact phrase or specify that words must occur in a certain order, even if separated by other words. Search expressions can be saved.

An optional word list can be used when entering a search expression. If one enters a word on the search command line which is not found, the list will highlight the most similar word. The list shows words in the original-language scripts and in the transliterated form. Unfortunately, the list is not sorted in Greek and Hebrew alphabetical order, but ASCII order! Thus accents and breathing marks affect the sort order. For example, agnoia ("a)/gnoia") is not next to ágnós ("a(gno/j") but it is separated by several dozen words. One can type in a word, but it can sometimes take two to three minutes to find the word. It often takes longer to find the word in the list than to execute the Bible search!

A search is performed on the text in the currently active window. When a search is complete, the matching verses are shown back-to-back. Matching words are highlighted, even for grammatical searches. However, occasionally the word highlighted does not correspond to the search term, particularly with a complex grammatical search. One can change the window display to a verse list by changing the windows parameters.

Greek and Hebrew grammatical search capabilities are very powerful. One can define up to ten grammatical elements. Each element consists of a part of speech, with optional aspects such as tense, voice, case and gender. These are selected by clicking on the appropriate items with a mouse. Once the elements are defined, they can be linked to a particular lemma, and one can combine them with other types of word, phrase and grammatical searches using Boolean operators. The grammatical elements defined with the point-and-click method are represented in the command line by a symbol such as . These flexible search provisions enabled TheWord to find Greek future perfect periphrastic construction (Bwin could do this, but BWorks could not). However, there is no provision for forced grammatical agreement between words or the ability to exclude a lemma or grammatical form between search terms, so it was not possible to search for genitive absolutes.

A major weakness of Greek searches is that accents must be entered. Not only are accents difficult to remember for many users, but they are also affected by context, which can make search results incomplete. It would be helpful if search preferences could be set to use or ignore such diacritical marks. The process of entering searches is also made more difficult because all words must be transliterated and Hebrew words must be entered in reverse order. Thus uios tou anqrwpou must be entered as "ui(o\j tou= a)nqrw/pou". Since the note editor allows Greek and Hebrew, these fonts could easily be used in search criteria.

On the whole, setting up grammatical searches is not as easy as the point-and-select method used in BWin, though it is more intuitive than a pure command-line approach. TheWord has great search power, since the grammatical elements can be combined with Boolean logic. It would be simpler to create grammatical searches if a brief summary of each grammatical element were shown in the list of elements, so one would not have to open a window to see what and mean.

Searches are generally fast. A typical word search or simple single term grammatical search is completed in about two seconds. However, once the search is complete it takes four seconds or more to redraw the window and display the verses! For complex searches a search progress window shows the percentage of text searched. However, sometimes the search-progress message clears several seconds before the search results are displayed, making the computer appear to lock up.

Concluding Observations

Notes can be attached to any verse. The note editor includes Greek and Hebrew capabilities. Hebrew is entered from right to left, though the Hebrew does not properly wrap to the next line. Verses and notes can be printed and can include Greek and Hebrew fonts. There is little control over the page layout. Drivers are included for twenty-one dot matrix printers and the HP LaserJet series, but not Postscript printers. Verses can be exported to ASCII text files and WordSoft's Scribe program.

The biggest hindrance to the usability of TheWord is its slow and idiosyncratic GUI. Even on an average 486DX-based system, window redrawing accounts for a major part of the search time. Windows are frequently completely cleared and redrawn, sometimes two or three times. This is distracting. In addition, window manipulation is different than for most other GUIs. This makes TheWord harder to learn. The good news is that a Windows version of the program is under development.