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Help Searching Jamieson's Dictionary Online with Hunter

The following text is meant to help users searching the full text of Jamieson's Dictionary Online.

The full text search engine used for Jamieson's Dictionary Online is a customized version of Hunter, an XML-aware engine developed by Alternative Output Inc. In the present implementation, the search engine supports keyword, phrase, and proximity searches of the full texts of Jamieson's Dictionary Online.

All indexing in this configuration of Hunter is case insensitive. Thus searches for sleekit, slEEkit, or SLEEKIT all return the same results.

Right truncation is the default, but users can specify a word form by adding a space after the search string. A search for 'loch ' will only find "loch" or "Loch" but a search for 'loch' without the trailing space will find "loch", "Lochleven", "Lochaber", "Lochlomond", etc. Similarly a search for 'shakespeare' will find texts containing "shakespeare" or "Shakespeare" as an exact match, a search for 'shakesp' will find "Shakespeare", "Shakespear", and "Shakesp.".

Hunter supports a rich set of proximity operators, including

near
(e.g., string1 within a specified number of characters of string2)
before
(e.g., string1 within a specified number of characters before string2)
after
(e.g., string1 within a specified number of characters after string2)
notnear
(e.g., string1 not within a specified number of characters of string2)
notbefore
(e.g., string1 not within a specified number of characters before string2)
notafter
(e.g., string1 not within a specified number of characters after string2)

The default proximity is 80 characters, but may be reset using the proximity pull-down menu in the search form. Here is an example of Edinburgh near castle with the default proximity of 80 and the samplesize set to 160 so that the hits will display on the screen. Here is Edinburgh near castle with the proximity set to 40 and samplesize set to 80 characters. Other multiword search terms are treated as phrases. Note the difference between king near counsel. and king and counsel. Note also the difference between Bannatyne and Bannatyne notnear poem.

The default search form looks like this:



Surrounding Context
Range of Proximity searches  

The default behavior is to generate a list of pages containing matches for the search string and a KWIC (KeyWord In Context) concordance with a user-selected sample size of the hits on each page. Pages are presented in the order of their appearance in the dictionary. Users may turn off the KWIC concordance by setting the sample size to "0". The size of the concordance display may also be expanded or contracted using the links at the top of the display page. The user may view the hits in a particular text by clicking the links above the display of hits for each entry.