Every word in the English language

[BigMoosie]

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

[Klaynos]

no I have no idea, by "every word" do you mean in common use or that exists?

 

Have you ever seen a full set of the OED?

[BigMoosie]

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.

[1veedo]

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.

[Guest graphix3332]

Hope you already found this, but if not, here is just about every word in the English language in one document separated by commas

 

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dd7nbv9f_33hfqg7rf4

[Realitycheck]

"a" is not in there

[Klaynos]

I can find an English word that isn't in there...

[chemkid]

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

[Dak]

ftp://ftp.itri.bton.ac.uk/bnc/ (study of british national corpus, words + freq data)

 

http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research/ilash/Moby/

 

http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/

 

whatcha doing, btw?