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Hymnary.org: a comprehensive index of hymns and hymnals

Welcome to Hymnary.org

  1. Text or Tune search
  2. Melody search
  3. Forums
  4. Wiki

Hymnary.org is a new kind of hymn Web site. Since its inception in 2007, its depth and power have drawn church musicians, hymnologists, and amateur hymn lovers alike. Hymnary.org currently contains 4,956 hymnals and collections, entries on 1,031,137 texts and 28,618 tunes, bibliographical information from sources such as Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology and hymnal handbooks, full scores of many hymns, and 9,803 media files.


Page scans for Missionary Hymnal

I added page scans for the 1906 Missionary Hymnal from the scanned version at Internet Archive. This is in part an test to see how it adding page scans from IA goes.

Summary: it works! It took some messing around for me to figure out how to get the images out of Internet Archive, how to convert them to a usable format, upload, etc. However, it can be done and it probably only takes an hour or two for a typical hymnal. There are hundreds more scanned hymnals at Internet Archive -- anyone interested in giving it a try?

Joy to the world!

Here are the top twenty most-published Christmas hymns, based on data from the Dictionary of North American Hymnology. The number following each hymn is the number of hymnals in which it was published in North America before 1979, according to the DNAH, plus about 40 hymnals published since then.

  1. Joy to the world! (1,387)
  2. Hark! the herald angels sing (974)

Search by Melody

A shiny new feature has just been added to Hymnary's search capabilities: a new tool for searching tunes by their melody. If you've ever tried searching by incipit, you know that it is far from easy - you have to convert notes to numbers in your head, and if you drop a note or misremember a pitch, nothing comes up. This new tool aims to take the pain out of the process by letting you input your search melody directly in musical notation, with no mental gymnastics required! (Read all about how to use it here).