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AntConc

AntConc

A freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis.

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AntConc

Older Versions

All previous releases of AntConc can be found at the following link. <*.exe> and <*_win.zip> are for Windows. <*.dmg>, <*.zip> and <*.pkg> files are for Macintosh OS X. <*.tar.gz> files are for Linux.

Frequent asked questions (FAQ)

  1. What is the difference between the Windows-Installer and Windows-Portable versions?
    • The Windows-Installer version will place the AntConc software in a safe location on your machine and put links to the software in the Start menu and on your desktop (if you want). This is the most common way to get software onto your computer. However, in cases where you are not allowed to install software on the computer (e.g. in a school environment) or when you want to put the software on a portable device like a USB stick, the Windows-Portable version is needed. In this version, all files are stored in a single folder. Open the folder and double click on the AntConc.exe to start. These packaging options were newly introduced with the release of AntConc 4.0.
  2. How do I get AntConc to work on a Apple Macintosh computer?
    • AntConc should work with the latest version of Apple's operating system. Double click the AntConc.dmg icon and follow the instructions to put the software into the Applications folder on your computer. You can then launch the software by double-clicking the icon in the Applications folder or from the Launchpad. This packaging option was newly introduced with the release of AntConc 4
  3. Can I use AntConc on a mobile device (e.g. iPhone, Android phone, iPad, or Chromebook)?
    • No. AntConc can only run on desktop computers.
  4. How can I search for a question mark (or other wildcard characters) in my corpus?
    • The question mark (?) is a wildcard character in AntConc meaning "any one character". To search for an actual question mark or any other wildcard character, just escape the character (e.g. \?) in the search query box. Note that you need to add these characters to the token definition when creating your corpus to be able to search for them later.
  5. When creating my own corpus, I get the following error: "Error: UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte XXX in position YYY: invalid start byte". What should I do?
    • This error is telling you that the file is not properly encoded in the default UTF-8 encoding used by AntConc and so it cannot be read. To address this problem, either resave your file using the UTF-8 encoding (recommended) or change the encoding setting of AntConc to match the encoding of the file (assuming you know what encoding your file is saved in). Many users don't know what encoding they are using which is why I recommend that the files are resaved with the UTF-8 encoding. You should be able to set the encoding in any standard text editor, e.g. NotePad or NotePad++.

User Support

Latest Help files

Discussion groups

Video tutorials

Downloadable guides

User Support

Latest Help file

Discussion groups

Development Road Map

My current tentative plans.

Status Description
Under development
  • Nothing at present.
Plans for 2022
and beyond
  • Improve tag handling (XML/Part-Of-Speech/...)
  • Add Concgrams (Wildcard/Regex context search) option.
  • Your suggestions come here...

Citing/Referencing AntConc

Use the following method to cite/reference AntConc according to the APA style guide:

For example if you download AntConc 4.1.1, which was released in 2022, you would cite/reference it as follows:

Word frequency lists

These 'wordlist' corpora can be loaded into AntConc (4.0 and later) via the Corpus Manager and used as reference corpora to create keyword lists.
These lists can be imported into AntConc (3.5.9 and earlier) and used as reference corpora word lists to create keyword lists.

Lemma lists

Lemma lists. These lists can be imported into AntConc (3.5.9 and earlier) to create lemma word lists. From AntConc 4.0, it is recommended that you Part-Of-Speech (POS) tag and lemmatize your files, e.g. using TagAnt, before loading them into AntConc. Then, the lemma forms can be displayed through menu options.
  • AntBNC Lemma List (ver. 004)
    • An automatically generated English lemma list based on all words in the BNC corpus with a frequency greater than 2 (created by Laurence Anthony). To use this list, *append* a hyphen (-) character to the AntConc token definition to ensure the processed correctly (see global settings). This list is extensively revised from the previous version, with all words with overlapping headwords combined into a single entry and all words including an apostrophe removed. As this process conflates words of different word classes into the same entry, the list serves more as a flemma list. The automatic generation process naturally introduces some erroneous entries, so the list should be checked before use, depending on the purpose.
  • Someya Lemma List (no hypens)
    • An edited version of the Someya English lemma list with no hypenated words (original list created by Yasumasa Someya).
  • Someya Lemma List
    • The original Someya English lemma list (created by Yasumasa Someya).
    • To use this list, *append* a hyphen (-) and apostrophe (') character to the AntConc token definition (see global settings).
  • French Lemma List
    • A French lemma list (created by Benoît Sagot).
  • Spanish Lemma List
    • A Spanish lemma list (developed by Laurence Anthony based on the list provided here).

Books/papers/websites related to AntConc

References to works citing AntConc can by found on Google Scholar here.

Interesting applications of AntConc

Here are a random collection of projects that use AntConc in interesting ways.
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