Just when I thought I understood searching lemma vs. homonym...it appears I don't

[Dan Phillips]

So I'm studying Psalm 23:6, and I want to see all the occurrences of ‎טוֹב. I right-click, and select "Search on homonym." It turns up 117 hits, of which the first is Genesis 2:9.

"Wait a minute," I say. "What about 1:31?" So I go there, and select search homonym on the exact same word...and this time it comes up with 373 hits. What? So then I try "Search on lemma"... and it comes up with 553 hits.

So then I go back to Psalm 23:6 and select "Search on lemma"...and get 553 hits.

Can someone please explain?

[Jim Wert]

Hi Dan,

In Psalm 23:6 your word is parsed as noun ...
In Gen 1:31 your word is parsed as adjective ...

When you ask BW to do a homonym search in Psa 23:6 it constructs it as lemma@n*+*Ha* (Check your list of saved searches).
When you ask BW to do a homonym search in Gen 1:31 it constructs it as lemma@a*+*Ha*

If you do your own search as something like lemma@*+Ha* it will find 490 occurrences in 460 verses.

Whether this is a design feature of BW, or a bug, I leave to you to decide.

By the way, the Forms tab illustrates the distribution nicely.

--Jim

Addendum:
Since you were searching with vowels turned off, your lemma search covered 3 lemmas, only one of which has homonyms.