Looking for words - research question

topic posted Fri, October 6, 2006 - 6:21 AM by  JM
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Thanks for the Morrison suggestions.

Here's another thing.
I need to start collecting texts with, say, the letter "x" in them, or the word "igloo." Not texts necessarily ABOUT igloos (although that would be fine, too). Abut also texts that just mention them.
I'm looking for literary texts from any period, in English.

Is there any ONE big, searchable online datebase I can run just ONE search on?
Or something offline I've overlooked?
I know this kind of thing exists for, say the complete works of Shakespeare... but does it exist for a collection of writers?
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JM
offline JM
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  • Re: Looking for words - research question

    Fri, October 6, 2006 - 12:33 PM
    Project Gutenberg recently added a feature to their advanced search option that allows you to search on a single term like this. www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/search Enter your term into the last field named Fulltext. Leave the other fields blank unless you want to narrow your search by language, etc. I used your example "igloo" and got 53 matches-including a poem by Robert Service, stories by Jack London, and a bunch of Arctic travel narratives. Click on the Fulltext Context link off to the side to see your text with the search term highlighted. This search option is labeled "experimental", but it seemed to work really well with this example.

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