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Every word in the English language


BigMoosie

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Hi, I am wanting to write a computer program for personal use. One thing I need to achieve my goal is a list of every word in the English language (UK english that is). If somebody could point me to a source where I could get each word in a text file, perhaps separated by commas or new lines etc. that would be great.

Regards,

Moosie

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I am after every word that exists as valid English. And the size of the list is no issue, I will not be sifting through the thousands of words, my computer will be.

 

Google searches are just turning up online dictionaries and other things irrelivant to me.

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If you're using Linux, there are plenty of lists, definitions, and even translations. Bablefish uses one of these packages for it's online server. I've never used them before but you might have a bunch of words in /usr/share/dict. I remember a while back gnome was bragging that w/ 2.14 they could process (ie, display) every word in that directory much faster than any other terminal available. The package is called wamaerican, wbritish, etc.

 

$ls /usr/share/dict

american-english british-english spanish words

 

There's also aspell [-en] "American, British and Canadian spellings are included.""

dict-freedict which is normally used as a client -- it fetches definitions online, or you can run a server

something like ibritish or ienglish for ispell

myspell

stardict...

 

I'm sure there are probably archives somewhere online that are compatible with windows as well. Maybe even a place where microsoft keeps spelling/grammar. I think if you install the windows version of abiword you get one of the above (which would probably be in program files/abiword) cause it's spell checker is the same on Linux and different from MS word.

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  • 1 year later...

What your looking for really varies with what you consider valid. There is no comprehensive, official English language, unlike a language such as french which has an official dictionary and committee electing new words to the language. For example, does Coca-cola count? Scientific names? Technical terms? Words like chlorate, chlorite, perchlorate, perchlorate, and chloride? It is very hard to say what is and isn't a word.

 

Chemkid

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