The program package was developed by the British linguist Mike Scott at the University of Liverpool and released as version 1.0 in 1996. It is based on the also co-developed by Mike Scott and in 1993 was first introduced concordance program "Micro Concord". Versions 1.0 through 4.0 were sold exclusively by Word Smith from the British Oxford University and the local Oxford University Press, the current version 5.0 and previous versions are now also distributed by the Lexical Analysis Software Limited.