Advanced search

First, one thing worth knowing

Greek changes the end of a word to show its job in the sentence, so a search for one spelling misses most of the places that word stands. Several of the tools below exist to fix that. You can also type Greek in plain letters if you have no Greek keyboard — the search page has a key to it, and shows both ways of typing.

Every form of a word

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

The Greek search box has a setting for this. Set it to any form of the word and typing one form finds them all — type the word as the text has it, in whatever ending it happens to show. Set it to only as I typed it and the search matches that one spelling alone.

There is also a search on its own for this: Every form of one word. Open it, type one Greek word in any form, and it finds every place the same word stands, however it is spelled there. It ignores the main search boxes and answers on its own.

A phrase can be widened the same way. After a search for an exact phrase, a button offers to find that phrase again with each word allowed to take any of its forms — useful when a phrase you searched for exactly might also appear declined.

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 — pod* finds every word beginning ποδ-, and an?r finds ἀνήρ without the accent mattering.

One exception: a * at the very start of a word is not a wildcard. In plain-letter Greek it marks a capital, so *a)xilleu/s means Ἀχιλλεύς and the search reads it as that one word.

Two things near each other

Use this to find where two words, phrases, or kinds of word fall close together.

Open Two things near each other and add a term for each thing you are looking for. Each term can be a phrase, an exact spelling, a word in any of its forms, or a piece of grammar (see below), and you can mix them freely.

Choose how close counts as near: a number of words apart, or the same verse. You can also ask that one term come strictly before or after another, and that every term appear in the order you listed them.

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.

Grammar as a filter

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

Every Greek word here carries a grammatical description — case, number, gender, tense, mood, voice, person, and so on. Inside Two things near each other, set a term's kind to Grammar and pick the description you want instead of typing a word. You need not know how the matching forms are spelled; you choose the description and the search finds the words.

Grammar works only as one term beside another, never as a search on its own. A single grammatical description alone — every plural, say — matches too much of the text to be a real question. Paired with a word or phrase, it becomes one: this word near a verb in a past tense is a question the tool can answer.

There is no setting for "noun" or "verb". Some words in Greek do the work of both at once, and nothing in the description tells them apart, so offering that choice would mean guessing.

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 Homer repeat? It lists every run of two to five words that recurs anywhere in the two poems — 68,550 of them as printed, 158,973 when different endings of the same words count together, and 118,695 in the English translation.

This differs from the epithet-formulas and the repeated lines shown elsewhere on this site. Those list phrases a scholar has judged significant, matched exactly and within one verse. The phrase index is a plainer tool: it counts anything that recurs twice or more, however it is spelled, and lets a run of words cross from one verse into the next unless you ask it not to — a setting worth using, since Homeric repetition mostly falls within one verse.

Click any phrase to see every place it occurs, each one linked to its passage in the reader.

Search in English

Use this to search the translation instead of the Greek.

The search page has a second box for English. It takes the same three settings as the Greek box — every word present, any one word present, or the exact phrase — and returns the passages that match, cited the same way as a Greek result.

The phrase index also has an English setting, browsing set phrases of the translation rather than the Greek. An English match there is cited by book rather than by verse, since translations are not lined up verse for verse with the Greek.

What these tools cannot tell you

• Searches ignore accents unless you turn accent matching on, so λόγος and a differently accented spelling of the same letters count as one word by default.
• None of these tools reads Greek. They match forms and count them. What a passage means remains your work.