Which term is defined as a structured list of words from a text showing how they are used in sentences?

• A. Concordance
• B. Collocation
• C. Co-text
• D. Context

Answer: (A)

A concordance is a structured list of occurrences of a word from a text that shows how it is used in sentences. In corpus work, you pull every time the word appears and present it with surrounding context, often in a Key Word In Context (KWIC) format, so you can see the range of meanings, functions, and patterns across the text. This makes it a precise tool for studying usage, sense variation, and which words tend to appear with the target word.

Collocation, by contrast, looks at frequent word pairings or groupings (which words tend to go together), not every occurrence of a word across the text. Co-text refers to the actual surrounding words of a single instance, i.e., the local environment of that one occurrence, not a compiled list of all occurrences. Context is the broader situational or discourse environment.

So the term defined as a structured list of words from a text showing how they are used in sentences is concordance. For example, a concordance for the word “run” would display each sentence with "run" and its surrounding words, revealing different senses and collocational patterns across the corpus.