Counting words in an OT passage

Hello,

I'm trying to come up with a word count for a specific Old Testament passage but I'm having a lot of trouble. The word list tool doesn't seem to be working with BHS or just the English ESV text.

Any ideas of how I can do it without manually counting each word in the Hebrew text?

Note: I'm using the latest Mac version of the program.

Thanks!

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Rosie Perera

Do you have Microsoft Word? You could copy and paste the text in question into Word; Word will automatically count the words for you and show you the word count in the lower left corner, on the status bar:

I don't know whether there's any way to do it in Logos that's as easy as that.

Note: You'll want to make sure to turn off "Copy Citations" and "Copy Footnotes" under Tools > Program Settings in Logos first, or your word count will include all the footnotes and citations.

Should work just as well in Hebrew:

Madison

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/639548#Comment_639548

Unfortunately it didn't work when I tried it with Hebrew.

Any other ideas?

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/639549#Comment_639549

When you say it "didn't work" how do you mean? Was the number off somewhat, or did Word fail to compute any number at all?

I'm afraid I'm off to bed now so hopefully someone else will help you with other ideas, preferably inside Logos. There must be some way to do it. I'm just not as familiar with the original language features. And I'm not aware of a simple word count feature, so it would involve some hack no doubt. But there are a lot of clever folks here so someone will help you figure it out.

Incidentally, you didn't need to post this question to two separate forums.

Graham Criddle

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/639549#Comment_639549

Hi Madison

Any other ideas?

Have you tried creating a "Word List" document? These are available in the Documents menu.

In there you can select a passage and Logos 5 will break it down into words and word counts.

From the Print / Export menu you can save it to an Excel file and then use Excel to sum the count column.

If you can't figure out how to do this please post back and I'll post some screenshots.

Hope this helps

Graham

Madison

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/639577#Comment_639577

Hi Madison

Any other ideas?

Have you tried creating a "Word List" document? These are available in the Documents menu.

In there you can select a passage and Logos 5 will break it down into words and word counts.

From the Print / Export menu you can save it to an Excel file and then use Excel to sum the count column.

If you can't figure out how to do this please post back and I'll post some screenshots.

Hope this helps

Graham

Hi Graham, I did try the Word List, but for some reason it just came up blank.

However, I did find something that works. Instead of just copy/pasting from BHS (which is what I was trying to do and it wouldn't work with Word), I used the copy bible verse tool and selected BHS from the drop-down. When I did that and pasted it into Word, it worked just fine. No clue why that is but hey, I'm not complaining. Problem solved!

Thanks for your help everyone and my apologies for posting two topics. If a moderator is reading this, please just delete the other topic.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/639654#Comment_639654

When I did that and pasted it into Word, it worked just fine. No clue why that is but hey, I'm not complaining. Problem solved!

Great to hear it! I always love it when Word is able to solve someone's problem. It's my baby. I worked at Microsoft on the Word development team for about 6 years in the 80s to early 90s. So I'm kind of biased as to the usefulness of Word to meet just about any need. But if you find any bugs in it, they're the fault of the teams working on it in more recent years. [:)]

Madison

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/639666#Comment_639666

When I did that and pasted it into Word, it worked just fine. No clue why that is but hey, I'm not complaining. Problem solved!

Great to hear it! I always love it when Word is able to solve someone's problem. It's my baby. I worked at Microsoft on the Word development team for about 6 years in the 80s to early 90s. So I'm kind of biased as to the usefulness of Word to meet just about any need. But if you find any bugs in it, they're the fault of the teams working on it in more recent years.

Oh nice. I'm a fan of Word too and I've never been on the dev team!

I'm running into a bit of an issue, though. One commentary (NAC on 1-2 Samuel) gives a number completely different from what I'm getting. Any ideas as to why that might be? The author gives 198 words for 2 Sam 7:18-29 but I get 176 in BHS. The English text is far greater than both of these numbers. I'm a bit lost on this.

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/639679#Comment_639679

The definition of "word" is particularly slippery ... think of German compounds created on the fly as a common example ... or the grammatical particles of Chinese. I don't know Hebrew but the first thing I would like at for an explanation would be separable prefixes.

George Somsel

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/639548#Comment_639548

I was considering giving you Rosie's solution, but you will ne ed to check for words joined by a maqqeph since that will most likely affect the total (I haven't checked that).

Madison

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/639742#Comment_639742

I was considering giving you Rosie's solution, but you will ne ed to check for words joined by a maqqeph since that will most likely affect the total (I haven't checked that).

Ah! That's what it must be, George. I'm going to go through and remove them to see if it makes the word counts line up. Thanks for the tip!

Edit: removed them all and it changed the word count slightly but I still didn't arrive at the same number. Perhaps the author is using a different Hebrew text? It is hard to tell. Oh well, I will include both numbers in my paper because either way my point still stands.

Thanks again for the help everyone.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/639679#Comment_639679

[EDIT: posted the image that I'd forgotten to include the first time]

I'm running into a bit of an issue, though. One commentary (NAC on 1-2 Samuel) gives a number completely different from what I'm getting. Any ideas as to why that might be? The author gives 198 words for 2 Sam 7:18-29 but I get 176 in BHS. The English text is far greater than both of these numbers. I'm a bit lost on this.

I dunno. I get 187 in BHS when I try it with BHS/WHM 4.2, but 176 with BHS SESB 2.0. Not sure what accounts for that difference, but this Text Comparison result might be enlightening; I don't have time to pore over it.)

So maybe the author of the commentary was using yet another version of the text. Or maybe he has a different way of counting words. For example, Word calls this 2 words, but he might count it as 3:

אֶת־הַתְּפִלָּ֖ה הַזֹּֽאת׃