Searching the database
About the Search Function
This website contains two kinds of texts:
- the first are scholarly articles written in modern English, using standardized Canadian spelling;
- the second are diplomatic transcriptions of early modern texts. These transcriptions faithfully reproduce the inconsistent spellings typical of printed and manuscript texts from this period.
A full-text search for any word will not return instances of that word with variant spellings. For example, if you type “usury” into the search box, the results will not include “usurie.” If you want to find variant spellings of “usury” in the diplomatic transcriptions, try using a wild-card or "fuzzy" search or entering different search terms. See “Early Modern Spelling” below for information on early modern spelling.
There are two "wild-card" characters you can use in your searches: asterisk and question mark. An asterisk represents zero or more characters; a question mark represents a single character. A wild-card search allows you to truncate endings, so that a search for “usur*” will return results that include “usury,” “usurie,” and “usurer.” The wild card can also be used within a word to return all possible variations in that position. For example, “g*ld” would return “gold,” “gould,” and “gowld.” Combining internal and terminal wild cards would return more variants. For example, “g?ld*” would yield results that include “golden,” “goldsmith,” and some variant spellings thereon. Please note that you if you use wildcards at the beginning of a word, the search may take a long time to complete.
Another strategy is to use a "fuzzy" search. This will find matches which are similar to the word you have entered. To do a fuzzy search, add the tilde character to the end of the word. For instance, a search for "abchurch~" will retrieve variants such as "Vpchurch" and "Apechurch". It will also retrieve "church", since that is also similar to "abchurch", so fuzzy searching can be less powerful than wild-card searching, but it does provide more flexibility if you're not sure what parts of a word may be subject to variation, and it can help you to identify spelling variants. For the technically-minded, fuzzy searching uses Levenshtein Distance to measure similarity, and you can set the level of similarity for the search by appending a number between 0 and 1 after the tilde. For instance, "shoreditch~0.5" will retrieve a range of variants including "scoreditch" and "sewersditch"; if you decrease it to 0.4, you will begin to see words such as "wherewith" and "houndsditch". The default value for fuzzy searching is 0.5.
The search page also provides a checkbox enabling you to replace all medial "s" characters with question-mark wild cards; this helps in the search for words that contain the long “s” (ſ). Presence or absence of long "s" is notoriously difficult to predict, so the question-mark wildcard is a good strategy.
Another helpful feature on the search page is a button which enables you to retrieve possible variant spellings of place names. This works only for place names, but it can be more effective than fuzzy searching because it is based on place markup in the XML encoding, so it will not retrieve variants that are not found inside tags referring to a specific place.
Common search-string operators will work as expected. For instance, you can search for an exact phrase by using quotation marks around it: "poore children". You can also put "+" before a word to insist that it must be in the document, and "-" (minus) to insist that it must not. For example: +queen -king will find documents that contain "queen" but not "king".
Searches are not case-sensitive.
Early Modern Spelling
To cover the maximum number of variant spellings in a full-text search, keep in mind the following peculiarities of early modern typography:
- “i” and “j” were interchangeable. If you were looking for the word “journey,” you might try “iourney” as well. You could also use a wildcard: "?ourney".
- “u” and “v” were interchangeable. If you were looking for the word “usury,” you might try “vsvry,” “vsury,” and “usvry” as well.
- “w” was often spelled using a double “v,” especially in the upper case. If you were looking for “water,” you might try “vvater” as well.
Renaissance orthography (spelling) was not standardized. Here are a few tips:
- Try replacing “i” with “y.” For example, search for both “ivy” and “yvy.”
- Try adding a terminal “e.” For example, search for both “gold” and “golde.”
- Try replacing “-y” endings with “-ie” and “-ye.” For example, search for “lady,” “ladie,” and “ladye.”
- Try replacing “-ed” endings with “-’d.” For example, search for both “placed” and “plac’d.”
- Try doubling consonants and adding an “e.” For example, search for both “dog” and “dogge.”
- Vowels can be spelled in multiple ways. For example, “gold” can also be spelled “gould” and “gowld.”
- Alternatively, a wild-card search is possible (see above). For example, “lad*” would return all possible endings, and “g?ld” would return all vowel variations.
For more information about early modern orthography, we recommend the following book. Pages 49-58 are excerpted online (pdf file). See especially the section entitled
Orthography and Printing in Shakespeare's Day.
Smith, Carl B., and Eugene W. Reade. Word History: A Guide to Understanding the English Language. Bloomington, IN: ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills (Indiana University), 1991.
This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.