KWIC is an acronym for Key Word In Context, the most common format for concordance lines. ...

A KWIC index is formed by sorting and aligning the words within an article title to allow each word (except the stop words) in titles to be searchable alphabetically in the index. It was a useful indexing method for technical manuals before computerized full text search became common. Stop words, or stopwords, is the name given to words which are filtered out prior to, or after, processing of natural language data (text). ... In text retrieval, full text search (also called free search text) refers to a technique for searching a computer-stored document or database; in a full text search, the search engine examines all of the words in every stored document as it tries to match search words supplied by the...

For example, the title statement of this article and the Wikipedia slogan would appear as follows in a KWIC index. A KWIC index usually uses a wide layout to allow the display of maximum 'in context' information (not shown in the following example).

The term permuted index is another name for a KWIC index, referring to the fact that it indexes all cyclic permutations of the headings. Books composed of many short sections with their own descriptive headings, most notably collections of manual pages, often ended with a permuted index section, allowing the reader to easily find a section by any word from its heading. This practice is no longer common today. A cyclic permutation is a permutation that shifts all elements of given ordered set by a fixed offset, with the elements shifted off the end inserted back at the beginning in the same order, i. ... The man page on man Almost all substantial UNIX and Unix-like operating systems have extensive documentation known as man pages (short for manual pages). The Unix command used to display them is man. ...

References in Literature

• D. L. Parnas uses a KWIC Index as an example on how to perform modular design in his paper "On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules" - Available as ACM Classic Paper

See also

• Concordancer
• Concordance (publishing)
• Burrows-Wheeler transform
• Hans Peter Luhn
• Suffix tree