Word Fans, you yourselves can easily do the work of a concordance if you have an electronic copy of The Hobbit and a particular word in your head.  That’s why I have tried to jazz up the entries with some trivia, some etymology, some observations on the distribution of the particular word before we look at the distributions of grand classes of words.  What if you don’t happen to have an electronic copy?  Or what if you’d just like to stroll through the garden of lovely words and see what strikes your fancy?

My advisor, for example, looked at the Concordance page and said, “Manflesh?  I don’t recall the goblins referring to… (click).. Oh, of course!  The trolls!”  On his advice, although we are wending our way toward my finish date for the project and I won’t have time for thoughtful posts about every word, I’m going to try to make a classic brief concordance entry for each of them so you can look at the distributions.  Someday perhaps I’ll have time and encouragement to fill out these entries with thoughtful observations.

Tonight I’m going to enter all of Gollum’s sibilance words since we’ve been talking about them.  The sounds indicated by “ss” (up to five Ss) are already listed under “hiss”.