The "Nature" of Words

In class we quickly looked at words and problems involved in choosing the write word form. One example I gave was 'nature'.

You can see how words are used, and especially what words often come before and after these words by using a concordancer. A concordancer is a tool that accesses a HUGE databank of language that has been collected from many sources. The word is found and you get a list of excerpts using this word.

I tried it with 'whereas' and these are the first 10:

001.NO. 1 NEWBURY PORT, MAY 30TH, 1791_"WHEREAS, a Bridge over Merrimack River, from
002. displeasure.You treat the matter lightly -- WHEREAS I myself was never more serious." "I t
003. escribed by Bonifacio and Lugiato {7}, WHEREAS the Ikeda degeneracy splits to yield puls
004. extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it", (23) WHEREAS Joe Gargery endures the shrewish onslaugh
005. rtrays the proximal radial epiphysis for boy 34,WHEREAS the same epiphysis for girl 2 is portrayed
006. military National Guard, they number only 4,400, WHEREAS the normal US garrison of about 10,000 me
007. tribes of south-west Siberia referred to above. WHEREAS in sparsely populated regions of the north
008. ice Frankfurter's famous doctrine of abstention.WHEREAS the earlier cases turned rather narrowly u
009. effectively got a dead short through an ammeterWHEREAS a a volt meter's got a a hun , a high er r
010. "ticks"' with eachtick equal to &formula;% and WHEREAS, prior to October 1986, a typical spread

I also found out that 'but' and 'that' are the most common words before 'whereas' and 'the' is the most common after the word. (stated at the bottom)
You can choose the corpus, which is the place the language is collected.

So play around with 'nature' and see what comes up. There is another concordancer in the list in the links. Maybe you can compare which you think is most useful. Should I put both in? Should I use only the link from here? Let me know.

Finally, in the links you have one that say 'synonyms and antonyms'. This is very useful for expanding your vocabulary. Have a look at it and the 3 possibilitites, namely to find words with similar meanings, to find words with opposite meanings, and to find definitions.