The Word Crunchers – New York Times

The Word Crunchers is a neat story from the New York Times on concordances. As the legend goes, the first concordance — of the Vulgate, completed in the early 13th century — required the labor of 500 Dominican friars. Even in more modern times, those who began concordances knew that they might not live long enough to see them completed. This was the case for the first directors of the Chaucer concordance, which took 50 years before reaching publication in 1927.