How to find a chapter where a word does NOT occur?

[Eleuterio]

It must be a very simple thing, but I confess I couldn't do it nor find a solution in Accordance help.

I need to find Psalms where an word or expression does NOT occur. I can do a search where one word does occur and exclude another words with <NOT>, but I wasn't able to do it with only non-occurrences of a word or root.

How can I do it? (Can I?)

[David Lang]

Try this:

 

1. In the More Options section of the search window, select "Chapter" from the "Search within every" pop-up menu, and choose Psalms (assuming you've defined a range for Psalms) in the range pop-up menu (the one immediately to the right preceded by the word "in".

 

2. Now enter "* <NOT> " followed by whatever term you want to exclude. This will search for every word in Psalms except for the search term following the NOT command, and because you've specified that this search term may not appear within an entire chapter, those Psalms containing that word will be excluded from your search results.

 

3. To see which Psalms were excluded, click the Details button, and then click the Table button.

 

4. Choose "Set Table Display..." from the Display menu (or use the keyboard shortcut Command-T) to modify the appearance of the Table window. Check "Show Chapter Detail" and click OK.

 

5. In the list of chapters, note the ones which have zero in the Total Hits column.

 

Hope this helps.

[Eleuterio]

Thank you for your fast response!!

 

It is not exactly what I imagined, but it works.

[David Lang]

This was an interesting search, so I discussed it in the latest post to the Accordance blog. There I explain the logic behind constructing the search this way.

[AlejandroBotta]

This was an interesting search, so I discussed it in the latest post to the Accordance blog. There I explain the logic behind constructing the search this way.

 

You have created such an amazing and beautiful program. Thanks for the continuous support!