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First, two things worth knowing

Greek changes the ends of words. English mostly does not: "virtue" looks the same wherever it stands. Greek changes the ending to show the word's job — ἀρετή, ἀρετῆς, ἀρετήν are one word doing three jobs. So a search for one spelling misses most of the places that word occurs. Several of these tools exist to fix that.

You can type Greek in plain letters. With no Greek keyboard, type the sounds instead — scholars call this Beta Code. texnh gives τέχνη. The search page has a key to it, and this page shows examples both ways.

Numbers like 1094a18 are Bekker numbers, the standard way of citing Aristotle. Most editions print them in the margin, so the same number finds the same passage in any edition or translation. Results here use them throughout.

Wildcards

Use this when you know part of a word but not all of it.

Type * to stand for any run of letters, or ? for exactly one letter. Both work in the middle of a word as well as at the end.

A wildcard in the middle narrows a search. Take one work, the Nicomachean Ethics: there l* reaches 70 different words, while l*s reaches 35 — every word that starts with λ and ends in ς, and no others. l?gos finds λόγος and λέγος alone, since ? stands for one letter. di*sun* finds δικαιοσύνη, which helps when you half-remember a long word.

Those four counts are for one work because a wildcard reaches further the more text you give it: across all 41, l* reaches 348 words and l*s 191, and l?gos picks up a third word, λύγος ("willow"). The search counts occurrences rather than distinct words, so it answers l* with a total, not with 348.

One exception. A * at the start of a word is not a wildcard: in Beta Code it marks a capital, so *a)nqrwpos means Ἄνθρωπος and the search reads it as that exact word. You cannot search by word ending alone.

A single lemma

Use this when you want one dictionary word wherever it stands, in every form it takes.

The Greek box already does most of this: set to Any form of this word it takes whatever form you type — λόγου as readily as λόγος — works out which dictionary word it belongs to, and finds every form of it. Use this panel when you would rather choose the word than have it worked out: type a few letters and it offers the headwords that begin that way, each with the number of times it occurs and a short definition where we have one. Tick the one you meant.

The picking matters. aitia offers αἰτία ("cause", 884 occurrences) and αἰτιάομαι ("accuse", 19) among others: words that begin alike and mean different things. Choosing the headword gets you the one you meant instead of everything that merely looks like it. Tick more than one and you get any of them.

One limit worth knowing. The index ignores accents, so ὅρος ("boundary"), ὄρος ("mountain") and ὀρός ("whey") share a single entry and no search here can separate them. Where that happens the tool lists the headwords together and says they are searched together, rather than offering a choice it cannot honour.

Word endings

Use this when you know a phrase but want every form of it, not just the one you typed.

Since Greek changes word endings, an exact phrase search finds only the version you typed. This tool finds the rest.

Take τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι — a phrase Aristotle uses for what a thing fundamentally is, usually translated "essence". Search it as an exact phrase and you find 102 passages. Press Find this phrase in any inflection and you find 132. The extra thirty are the same phrase with a different ending on its first word: τῷ τί ἦν εἶναι, τοῦ τί ἦν εἶναι. No exact search can reach them, because the letters on the page are different.

To find them yourself you would need to know that τό, τῷ and τοῦ are forms of one word, and that ἦν and εἶναι both belong to the verb "to be". The tool knows it for you. Type the words as they stand on the page.

It invents nothing. κατὰ συμβεβηκός ("accidentally") goes from 330 passages to 330, because across all 41 works that phrase takes one form only. A tool that always found more would tell you nothing.

Search by grammar

Use this to find a kind of word rather than a particular word.

Every Greek word here carries a grammatical description: singular or plural, past or present, and so on. You can search those descriptions instead of the spelling. Pick as many as you like; a word must match them all.

Grammar is one term inside a combo search, never a search of its own. On its own it would not be a question: there are 33,504 genitive plural feminines in 41 works, and a list of them tells you something about Greek rather than about Aristotle. Beside another term it earns its keep — this word near a verb in the optative is a real question, and it is the one the tool answers. Set a term's Kind to Grammatical under Words near each other.

You need not know how any of these forms are spelled. You pick the description; the search finds the words.

Why some results say "one of several readings"

The same Greek letters can be two different forms. When that happens the tool marks the result instead of choosing one for you.

The Nicomachean Ethics holds 537 optatives. Of those, 280 have one possible reading; a hit on any of the other 257 comes back marked, because you could read those letters another way. The mark shows no flaw in the search. It reports a fact about the Greek.

A clearer case: of the 31 genitive duals (the dual describes pairs of things), not one is certain. In the dual, genitive and dative share one ending. The search cannot tell them apart because Greek does not, and it says so instead of deciding for you.

You will find no option for "noun", "verb" or "adjective". We left it out on purpose. The descriptions this site uses do not record parts of speech, and we cannot work them out — a participle behaves as both verb and noun, and nothing separates a noun from an adjective. Offering the choice would mean making it up.

Words near each other

Use this to find where two ideas are discussed together.

Ask for two or more things close together in the text. Each slot takes an exact phrase, a single word, a word in all its forms, or a grammatical description, and you can mix them. "This word near a verb in the optative" is a question you can put here.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, ἀρετή ("virtue") and ψυχή ("soul") fall within ten words of each other 13 times, and share a line 5 times — among them 1139a17 and 1144a30, where Aristotle discusses the parts of the soul and their virtues. Search either word alone and you get 273 and 44 passages to check.

The controls

• Window — how close is close. Five words by default, which is about half a line of Greek. You can widen it to 50, about five lines.
• Measured in — count that distance in words, or ask instead for the same line or the same chapter.
• Relative to the first term — you can require a term to come before or after the first one, rather than simply near it.
• In this order — everything must appear in the order you typed it.

A match never crosses from one book into the next, however wide the window: the last words of one book and the first of the next are not near each other in any useful sense. Matches do cross chapter boundaries by default, since an argument often runs through one, but you can turn that off.

The phrase index

Use this when you do not yet know what to look for.

Search answers "where does this occur?" The phrase index answers a different question: what does Aristotle repeat? It lists every phrase of two to five words that appears at least twice anywhere in his works — 173,884 of them as written, and 390,675 when forms of the same word count together. (If you have met the term, these are what linguists call n-grams.)

This matters because much of Aristotle's technical vocabulary consists of set phrases rather than single words, and no word search will show them to you: ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ ("for the most part") occurs 204 times across 22 of the 41 works; τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι ("essence") 103 times; κατὰ συμβεβηκός ("accidentally") 330 times across 25 works. Not one of those is a word. Each is an idea, and browsing is the only way to meet them.

Reading a row

Every row is one phrase and four numbers. This is the row for τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι:

The same phrase, counted two ways

The two buttons at the top of the page are the same corpus read differently, and it is worth seeing what changes. Word as written counts the letters on the page: change one ending and it is a different row. Word in any of its forms counts the words behind the letters, so every inflection of the phrase gathers into a single row. Either takes the phrase as it stands on the page — type τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι and the second finds it under ὁ τίς εἰμί εἰμί, which is where it is stored. The same expression appears in both:

The dictionary row gathers ten different spellings into one:

The first four are the phrase you were looking for, declined. The last six are not: they merely happen to be built from the same dictionary words, and the tool cannot tell the difference — εἰμί covers ἦν, ἐστιν, εἴη and ἔστω alike. So the dictionary reading finds more and asks more of you. Use it to discover what you would otherwise miss, then read as written to see what you have.

Notice the score falls from 1,611.9 to 629.8 for what is, in the main, the same expression. Nothing has weakened: ὁ and εἰμί are among the commonest words in Greek, so a phrase made of them is far less surprising than one made of ἦν and εἶναι in that exact shape. Distinctiveness measures surprise against the words a phrase is made of, and the two readings are made of different words.

Reading the list

• As written, or in any of its forms. The first lists phrases exactly as they appear. The second gathers the different endings of one phrase together, which finds more but is harder to read — in dictionary form, τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι comes out as ὁ τίς εἰμί εἰμί. You need not know that: type the words as they stand and the page resolves them, telling you which reading it matched.
• Distinctiveness orders the list by default. It asks whether a phrase occurs more often than the commonness of its words would lead you to expect. That is why κατὰ συμβεβηκός comes near the top of the κ list and καὶ τό ("and the") does not, though "and the" occurs eleven times as often. Sort by plain frequency and you see the grammar of Greek rather than the thought of Aristotle.
• Filters narrow the list by phrase length, by how often a phrase occurs, and by which work it appears in. Sorting never removes anything — it only changes the order.

Click any phrase to see every place it occurs, grouped by work, each one linked to that passage in the reader.

A way to use it

Pick the work you are reading and a phrase length of four or five, then sort by distinctiveness. You get that work's set expressions — often the technical vocabulary of its argument, including phrases no glossary would have sent you to look for. Click one to see where else in Aristotle it stands.

What these tools cannot tell you

All of this depends on a word-by-word grammatical description of the Greek, and that description is often uncertain. Where it is, these tools say so rather than choose an answer and present it as fact. The limits worth knowing:

• A result marked as having several possible readings comes from a form the description cannot settle. Of the words that have a case, about half leave it open which case that is.
• Searches ignore accents, so λόγος and λογός count as one word. The search page has a setting to match accents exactly.
• The phrase index shows Greek without accents, because it does not record them. We do not guess them.
• Later editors made the chapter divisions, not Aristotle. In most works we know where a chapter begins to the exact word; in Categories and De Interpretatione we know it only to the line, and any search that turns on chapter boundaries says so when those works are involved.
• An exact phrase search cannot match across the boundary between two columns of the printed text; the phrase index and the proximity search can. This is why the index counts τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι 103 times while an exact search finds 102. One occurrence straddles a column break.
• None of these tools reads Greek. They match forms and count them. What a passage means remains your work.

The Greek text is the TLG. The grammatical descriptions come from Morpheus, by way of Diogenes; the dictionary is Liddell–Scott–Jones.