A
concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, listing every instance of each word with its immediate context. Because of the time, difficulty, and expense involved in creating a concordance in the pre-
computer era, only works of special importance, such as the
Vedas,
Bible,
Qur'an or the works of
Shakespeare or classical Latin and Greek authors, had concordances prepared for them.