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Full-corpus search
Every word the project has, indexed.
This is the deepest layer of the project. The catalogue shows 137 verified HIGH/MEDIUM Shakespeare references. Candidate echoes show 35,794 short verbatim matches. Below that sits the corpus itself: every letter, essay, play, and speech the project ingested, indexed for full-text search.
82,107 documents are indexed for search: 9,648 from Adams, 4,425 from Franklin, 7,194 from Hamilton, 20,518 from Jefferson, 8,618 from Madison, 31,666 from Washington, and Shakespeare’s 38 works. Search any word or phrase. Filter by who, when, and what kind of document.
Indexed corpus vs analysis corpus. The 82,107 figure counts indexed backend rows — everything the project ingested, including editorial headnotes and documents whose body text was empty (Founders Online editorial entries make up about 15% of Adams’s rows and ~75% of Franklin’s). The analysis corpus used in the essays and statistical case studies is the subset with non-empty body text: 68,287 documents, 23.7 million Founder words plus 891,000 Shakespeare words. Per-author analysis corpus sizes (docs with text): Washington 20,116, Jefferson 20,085, Adams 9,093, Madison 8,554, Hamilton 7,007, Franklin 3,432, Shakespeare 38. The search index here is the broader of the two so a casual lookup never misses a document, but cite the analysis corpus when quoting per-million rates.
A note on coverage. Search runs over the raw text after light cleaning, so you’ll see editorial headnotes, signature blocks, and occasional Folio stage directions in the results alongside the substantive prose. Treat the snippets as pointers to the source on Founders Online or the Folger, not as the final word on what a document contains.
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For curated Shakespeare references, see the Reference Catalogue. For shorter verbatim matches that didn’t make the strict cut, see Candidate Echoes.