The search form
is divided into five parts which can be used together or separately :
1. Search Articles
for: Type in a word or phrase
and the search engine will return all occurrences of the word/phrase
in the Encyclopédie.
2. Limit your
search by the following fields: This section helps you refine
your search. For example, you may want to look for the
word autorité (typed in the "Search Articles
for" box) but with specific options or limitations. Note that
you can combine different options. Let's go over the different search
boxes and what options they offer:
Headword: this is the
title of an article. For example, if you are looking for the word
“justice” in an article with the word politique in
the headword, type justice in the “Search
Articles for” box and then type politique in the
“Headword” box and run the search. The results page will show
you the different articles in which the word justice appears
in an article with the word politique in the title.
Search Operators and Headwords - Often, small headword searches (e.g., "eau") will return a large list of all headwords that contain that particular string of letters (e.g., "ANNEAU" "AGNEAU" "FAISCEAUX", etc.) to get around this issue you can limit headword searches using the following operators:
@eau@ for headwords that contain the word "eau"
@eau* gets words beginning with eau
^eau headwords that begin with eau
^eau$ only the headword(s) eau
eau$ headwords that end in eau
eau@ words that end in eau
*Note: @xxx is now the default headword search on the Advanced Search page, to expand your query please check the "expanded headword search" box.
Author: this search
box allows to limit your search to a certain author. For instance,
you can look for the word justice in articles
written by d'Holbach by typing justice in the
"Search Articles for" box and "holbach" in the
box searches the classes of knowledge (disciplines or domains) the
Encyclopédistes assigned to certain articles, such as "Géogr."
in this example:
ACRE, s. (Géogr.)
Ptolémaïde, S. Jean d'Acre, ville d'Asie, qui appartient aux
This search field allows you
to limit your search to a certain class or classes used in the
Encyclopédie. Note that not all articles have a classification. So
for example, you can search for all the articles which contain the
word Italie and that are classified in the
Encyclopédie as gEog. You would therefore
type Italie in the "Search articles for"
box and gEog (with the capital "E"
catching any accents) in the "Classification" box.
This is a normalized (orthographically speaking) version of the
classifications used in the Encyclopédie. If in the text the
classification appears as géogr, the normalized version
will be géographie. You can therefore use this search
box to limit your search of the word Italie to a
normalized class such as astronomie. You would
type Italie in the "Search articles for"
box and then astronomie in the "Normalized
This is the translated version of the Normalized Classification. It
works the same way except that you would type the class in English,
Part of speech: This
is the part of speech to which a word belongs. Therefore, you may
want to look for the word Italie in articles where the
headword is an adjective. You would then type adj in
the "Part of speech" box. You could also
type s.f. for a feminine word, or s.m. for
a masculine word.
Type of entry: Here
you may limit your searches by main articles (artm), sub-articles
(arts), plate legends (plate_legend), and editorial matter
NOTE: By clicking
the "Terms" button you can see all of the
possibilities for any of the above metadata (Headword, Author, Classification, etc.)
3. Select a Search Option:
This can allow you to search for two or more words and to specify
how close they occur together in the text.
By default, this is set to a
« Single Term or Phrase Search » : this means that if
you type autorité politique in the search box, the
search engine will look for articles in which the
expression autorité politique occurs.
Proximity Searching: this
allows you to decide whether you want your words to be in the same
sentence, the same paragraph, or if you want to set the number of
words which should separate your search terms.
4. Select a Results
Format: This allows you to select how you want your search
results to be displayed. You have the choice between five different
this is the option set be default. For each result, you will see 300
characters of the article which matched your search.
KWIC Report: you will
only see a single line of text for each search result. This can be
useful if you only want a list of results, or to see many results at
Frequency by Article
Title: this will show you the frequency of occurrence for a word
or expression in every article that matched your search.
Collocation Table: The
collocation table report provides users with a simple way of seeing
the words with which the search terms most often co-occur.
Line by Line (KWIC) Sorted
by keyword and word: Here users can sort their KWIC reports by
the keyword and the word immediately to its right or left.
5. Browse Headwords
Alphabetically: Users can
browse all headwords alphabetically.