Early English Books Online (EEBO) on the ProQuest Platform

How does the Variants Searching work on the ProQuest platform?

All the variant form and spelling suggestions are now grouped together in one dictionary.

On the advanced search page, three checkboxes for Variants searching are selected by default. You can include Spelling variants and Form variants for search terms. You can also select the third checkbox to show the variant spellings and variant forms of your keyword on top of the result list.

If you type a search term in the search box, you will automatically retrieve all instances of your search term and its early modern variant inflected forms and spellings in EEBO. For example, if you type the word murder, when you submit your search you will retrieve all occurrences of the word murder together with its inflected forms murdered, murdering, murders and its early modern variant spellings murther, murdre, murdir and mvrder.

Plus instances of early modern spelling variants of all the various inflected forms of your original search term, for  instance murthred, murthrest, murdreth, murdring, murtherynge and murthers.

See the example illustrated below.

Please note:

If you wish to search for the exact terms you typed, ensure that the Spelling variants and Form variants checkboxes are unselected. Alternatively, variant search is deactivated when the search term(s) are put in “quotes” or when the truncation wildcards * or ? are used.

NEW! You can use curly brackets with quotation marks if you wish to look for spelling and form variants of the words contained within a particular phrase. For example, in Early English Books Online, searching on “{God save the king}” will retrieve both the exact phrase God save the king and its Early English spelling and form variants, such as God saue the kyng.

1) - When using Advanced search to search keywords:

2) - Select the first checkboxes if you would like to include variant forms and spellings for search terms. Select the third checkbox to show the variant spellings and variant forms of your keyword on top of the result list.

3) - The variant spellings and variant forms of your keyword can be listed on top of the result list.

4) - Click this link if you would like the result list without variants.

1 - Find the new Keyword Search feature on the left panel of TCP full text documents. Easily toggle between Keyword Search and the Table of Contents using the buttons shown on the left.

2 - search for keywords in the current document

3 - Occurrences of searched keywords are presented as text snippets within the Table of Contents. Notice that also the variants of the word are retrieved

4 - Click link to turn on Search term navigation/jump to first hit. You will navigate from one search term to the next or previous, by clicking the arrows next to each term (see 7).

5 - The hit highlight color has been changed to light blue

6 - More text snippets around occurrences of the search terms are shown on the left. Clicking on a text snippet will navigate to the location of the keyword in the document.

7 - the keywords appear highlghted in the text and followed or preceded by the navigation arrows.

EEBO on ProQuest offers several display formats: 

1 - the TCP transcribed Ful Text when available

2 - the scanned Image of the full text, where each page be browsed and magnified with the flash viewer

3 - the Thumbnails page with an index with thumbnails and notes of all the singles scanned images of the document

4 - the PDF version of the full document, which can be printed by single page.

5 - the full Indexing details of the document

Look at each document linked below for more details on each of these formats.

1- The Browse feature of Early English Books Online allows you to view the list of documents by:

2 - 
Date (Decades or single years)
Author A-Z
Author by Country of Publication
Author by Language

3 - Click on the link View # document(s) next to the term of interest to reveal all books by that particular Date, Author, Language or Country in the Results page.

For the Author Name list: Select a letter to go down to a list of all authors whose name start with this particular letter.

For the Country of Publication and the Language lists, go to the term of interest, then either click on the View # document link next to it, to see all the books by that particular Country or Language, or click on the plus sign on the left of the term to show the Author names for that country or language and the nrs of documents per each.

4 - Browse the Thomason Tracts by volume and tract number.

5 - Click on the Volumes link to view content.

Early Modern Books

Early English Books Online can be searched as standalone or as part of Early Modern Books (EMB), which provides an integrated search and browse experience across both Early European Books (EEB) and EEBO. EMB will automatically be added to the ProQuest platform account of all EEBO customers.

Searching both English printed titles alongside European titles could provide new discoveries of works that have traveled geographically and linguistically across Europe.

EEBO and EMB, alongside any other databases that your institution has access to, are selected via the Change Databases menu in the ProQuest Platform’s main navigation, which appears on every page.