I have been a user of Logos Bible Software for over ten years, and I am just discovering the complementary benefits of BibleWorks. I will be doing a multi-part review of BibleWorks 9, specifically highlighting some of these benefits. For now I wanted to pass on one tip for constructing Hebrew morphological searches in the BibleWorks command line.
I wanted to search for all the occurrences of II_קרא. Typing .קרא@v* in the command line finds all occurrences of I_קרא and II_קרא. I could not figure out how to distinguish the second homonym from the first in my search terminology, so I turned to the BibleWorks forums. The good folks there promptly replied to my question. Thanks BK Mitchell and Glenn Weaver!
The first homonym is tagged with the letter “a”, the second “b”. The search for II_קרא looks like this: .קרא@v*+*Hb*
The pictures below shows (1) exactly what this looks like typed into the command line and (2) the results displayed after running the search. These are pictures of Bibleworks 8; I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of my upgrade to BibleWorks 9.
The formula .[insert Hebrew word]@[insert part of speech letter]*+*H[insert homonym letter]* seems to work with lemmata other than קרא as well. The brackets should not be included in the search term; they are there to indicate that the words between them are instructions.
Brian W. Davidson 
5 responses to “How to Disambiguate Homonyms in BibleWorks Searches”
This is a really great feature. Thanks for the post!
Thanks, Abram. Your Bibleworks posts were one of a few things that put the program back on my radar. I’ve been exploring it a bit and finding it very useful this time around. In Logos it is a lot easier to distinguish between homonyms in basic morph searches, but the method outlined here isn’t too cumbersome, I don’t think.
Great! Glad to hear it, Brian. Are you going to be posting more about BibleWorks 9? I’ll be doing some posts in the coming weeks, by way of review….
I will be doing the same.
That’s great! I’ll look forward to reading yours.