Is WordCruncher for me?

If you do anything with texts, then WordCruncher is for you. You can read eBooks like a Kindle reader, search through the text, and use analysis reports to study word relationships, n-grams, and more. Whether you’re reading a book, writing a speech, collecting data for a paper, or simply looking for new meaning in texts, WordCruncher is for you.

While our team works hard to add new books to the bookstore, you can add any of your own digital texts in WordCruncher by importing your files with the WordCruncher Indexer program.

When will WordCruncher be available on Mac?

We are currently developing a cross-platform version of WordCruncher that will be available on Mac, Windows, and Linux, with a target release of early 2027.

Why am I getting different results for the same search?

The most common culprit is the search query itself. If you change one setting in your query, your results can change drastically. For example, changing the word list will search an entirely different section of text. Check settings like the book, the word list, All Forms, Ignore Case, and search bounds.

Is WordCruncher good for non-English languages?

WordCruncher’s tools are designed to handle many languages. Whether your text is in English, Japanese, Hebrew, or another language, you can search, study, and analyze the text.

The bookstore offers several multi-language texts, including The Scriptures, TED Talks, and The Quran. These books are available as synchronous books, which means that when you study The Scriptures in two languages at the same time, they will scroll together.

Additionally, WordCruncher menus, windows, and helps are available in English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Can I request a text?

Yes. We have full-time and student employees who prepare new eBooks to support research and teaching. We may be able to provide assistance with creating a WordCruncher eBook for private use or for publication in the WordCruncher Bookstore.

In order for a book to be published in the WordCruncher Bookstore, it must be approved by the Research Technology Group. To determine whether a text is approved, we evaluate a text by the following requirements:

1. Permission: The author or publisher must provide permission for publication.
   This does not apply to texts in the public domain.
2. Purpose and impact: Publication of the text aligns with the mission of the Research Technology Group at Brigham Young University, which is to empower students, faculty, and researchers to deepen their understanding of religious, historic, and literary texts.
3. Scope: Expectations for publication are clearly outlined, including book features (such as metadata) and content updates, if applicable.

To request a text, email wordcruncher@byu.edu.

Does WordCruncher offer part-of-speech tagging?

WordCruncher’s search and analysis features are enhanced by part-of-speech tagging, but the software does not currently tag texts for you.

You can…

• Browse the bookstore to see which books have been tagged by part of speech.
• Use this Python part-of-speech tagger to tag a TXT file of your own.
• Tag the text yourself with packages like spaCy and stanza.

I’m using the iOS version, but I’m having trouble with __.

The iOS version has limited functionality and support. Because of this, it functions best as a simple e-reader and search engine. Most books in the WordCruncher Bookstore are available in iOS, but some books have advanced features that must be viewed on a computer.

If you experience a technical issue with the iOS version, we will do our best to resolve it, but our developers’ main focus is the new cross-platform version for Mac, Windows, and Linux. For full functionality, please download WordCruncher for PC.

Can I put Bookstore data on a USB or other drive besides the C drive?

Yes. After installing WordCruncher, run the WordCruncher Data Location Manager. This is a separate program that is installed with WordCruncher. We do not recommend storing data on network or cloud drives because WordCruncher will slow down significantly.