Laurence Anthony's Website

AntConc

A freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis

Downloads

Official releases

AntConc 3x series

Older releases

Donations

Click one of the following if you want to make a small donation to support the future development of this tool.

Older releases

All previous releases of AntConc can be found at the following link. *.exe and *_win.zip are for Windows. *.dmg, *.zip and *.pkg files are for Macintosh OS X. *.tar.gz files are for Linux.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

  1. What is the difference between the Windows-Installer and Windows-Portable versions?
    • The Windows-Installer version will place the AntConc software in a safe location on your machine and put links to the software in the Start menu and on your desktop (if you want). This is the most common way to get software onto your computer. However, in cases where you are not allowed to install software on the computer (e.g. in a school environment) or when you want to put the software on a portable device like a USB stick, the Windows-Portable version is needed. In this version, all files are stored in a single folder. Open the folder and double click on the AntConc.exe to start. These packaging options were newly introduced with the release of AntConc 4.0.
  2. How do I get AntConc to work on a Apple Macintosh computer?
    • AntConc should work with the latest version of Apple’s operating system. Double click the AntConc.dmg icon and follow the instructions to put the software into the Applications folder on your computer. You can then launch the software by double-clicking the icon in the Applications folder or from the Launchpad. This packaging option was newly introduced with the release of AntConc 4.
  3. Can I use AntConc on a mobile device (e.g. iPhone, Android phone, iPad, or Chromebook)?
    • No. AntConc can only run on desktop computers.
  4. How can I search for a question mark (or other wildcard characters) in my corpus?
    • The question mark (?) is a wildcard character in AntConc meaning “any one character”. To search for an actual question mark or any other wildcard character, just escape the character (e.g. ?) in the search query box. Note that you need to add these characters to the token definition when creating your corpus to be able to search for them later.
  5. When creating my own corpus, I get the following error: “Error: UnicodeDecodeError: ‘utf-8’ codec can’t decode byte XXX in position YYY: invalid start byte”. What should I do?
    • This error is telling you that the file is not properly encoded in the default UTF-8 encoding used by AntConc and so it cannot be read. To address this problem, either resave your file using the UTF-8 encoding (recommended) or change the encoding setting of AntConc to match the encoding of the file (assuming you know what encoding your file is saved in). Many users don’t know what encoding they are using which is why I recommend that the files are resaved with the UTF-8 encoding. You should be able to set the encoding in any standard text editor, e.g. NotePad or NotePad++. d ## User Support

Discussion Groups

Video Tutorials

Downloadable Guides

Help File Translations

Common Statistics Used In Corpus Linguistics

Anthony, L. (2023). Common Statistics Used In Corpus Linguistics. Available at Link

Word Frequency Lists

These ‘wordlist’ corpora can be loaded into AntConc (4.0 and later) via the Corpus Manager and used as reference corpora to create keyword lists.

  • BE06 corpus and AME06 corpus frequency lists
    • The complete BE06 and AmE06 corpora are included in the software. Developed by Paul Baker. For more information on the design of the corpora behind these lists, see Paul Baker’s homepage.

For AntConc (3.5.9 and earlier):

Lemma Lists

Available lemma lists for AntConc:

Citations and Applications

Citations

Interesting Applications

Citation/Reference

Use the following method to cite/reference AntConc according to the APA style guide:

  • Anthony, L. [other author] (YEAR OF RELEASE). AntConc (Version VERSION NUMBER) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/AntConc

For example if you download AntConc 4.3.1, which was released in 2024, you would cite/reference it as follows:

  • Anthony, L. (2024). AntConc (Version 4.3.1) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/AntConc