===== scowl-2020.12.07/r/enable/readme ===== ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ ENABLE ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ The Enhanced North American Benchmark LExicon (ENABLE) is the most thoroughly researched, and therefore the most authoritative word list and reference available for Scrabble players. The word list file itself retains the name WORD.LST, to retain compatibility with the WORDY utilities (http://personal.riverusers.com/~thegrendel/wordy530.zip) originally written for it. The word list is in plain ASCII format, unencrypted, and is placed in the Public Domain for anyone to use as they see fit. It is non-proprietary, free, and freely available for any legal use. Moreover, it is "open source" in the sense that the researcher and compiler, Alan Beale, carefully explains and elucidates the reasoning that has influenced his judgments on which words belong in the list and why. The first edition of ENABLE has become a recognized standard and a benchmark for the Scrabble community. This revised millennial edition continues in the same proud tradition. Since the release of its first edition, in the fall of 1997, ENABLE has become something of a de facto standard for electronic word lists used by word gamers. It has been adopted by developers and programmers for interactive on-line word game servers and word construction (anagramming) software. The master word list in ENABLE, WORD.LST, is *not* the so-called TWL98, a proprietary word list prepared by an "official" dictionary committee with a corporate agenda. On the contrary, it is an even more accurate and authoritative reference for the serious Scrabble player. It is primarily the result of a single unifying vision, that of Alan Beale, who dedicated countless hours to research. ENABLE therefore represents not merely a superior alternative to the OSPD/TWL, it threatens to supplant and replace it, to squeeze the very life out of it in a process of Darwinian selection. ENABLE reflects the changes to the OSPD that went into place as of January 1, 1998, so many "old friends", such as "vin" and "da" have now disappeared. The original WORD.LST contained 100,701 words, this enhanced Y2K update has 173,528. This word list would not have been possible without the help of a number of people in the Scrabble community, most notably Alan Beale for his tireless research, and to them go my thanks. This revised second edition of ENABLE incorporates the words added to the new printings of MW10, as well as Alan Beale's research into obscure plurals and other lexicographic arcana. Ample documentation for the claims of accuracy and authoritativeness of the ENABLE list is contained in the SUPP2K.ZIP archive, particularly in the file TWL_ENAB.DOC. This file contains a detailed listing of the differences between the ENABLE list and the DOOM/TWL98 list, including sources and justifications for the additions and corrections. The master word list, WORD.LST, contains all 70 of the MW10 "also called" words. These are the italicized entries in the MW10 hidden in definitions of other words with the notation "also called". An example of this is found in the entry for "streelight", wherein is the notation "also called streetlamp". Therefore, the word "streetlamp" belongs in the ENABLE WORD.LST. A complete list of these "also called" words, with appropriate cross-references, may be found in the ALSO.LST file in the SUPP2K.ZIP archive. Note that the DOOM/TWL98 list opened this particular "can of worms" with the adoption of the word "starfruit", found in the definition of "carambola". Nevertheless, the DOOM/TWL98 list still omits some of the plurals of these words. This edition of ENABLE benefits from the painstaking research on obscure plurals done by Alan Beale. He unearthed a number of explicit plurals in MW10 that OSPD and other lists omit (see PLURALS.DOC in the supplementary archive). This alone gives ENABLE a significant advantage over OSPD and TWL. In contrast to other word lists, the ENABLE list has not been crippled by being limited to words under an arbitrary length. The ENABLE list is eminently suitable for most word games, such as Anagrams and Clabbers, and for crossword puzzle solving, rather than just for Scrabble. A great deal of research has gone into removing this limitation, however the list is much the better for it. The file SIGWORD.LST is a list of the 1024 words in WORD.LST that do not appear in the OSPD or MW10, but either appear in other standard sources or are words the ENABLE maintainers believe worthy of lexicographic recognition. These "signature words" distinguish this list from others. Of course, those wishing to may delete the SIGWORD.LST words from the WORD.LST in order to obtain a more "standardized" listing. This may be accomplished simply and quickly using the UNIX "comm" utility in the following manner: comm -23 word.lst sigword.list > word.lst.new. This will create the file "word.lst.new" with the signature words deleted. As of this update, it is no longer necessary for DOS and Windows users to resort to manually editing the WORD.LST file to remove the SIGWORD.LST words. Alan Beale's MAKELIST utility, distributed in the supplementary archive, provides the opportunity to build custom lists by combining selected auxiliary lists from the ENABLE2K supplement with the base list. Even UNIX users may find MAKELIST more convenient than running built-ins from the command line or a script. ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ The ENABLE master word list, WORD.LST, is herewith formally released into the Public Domain. Anyone is free to use it or distribute it in any manner they see fit. No fee or registration is required for its use nor are "contributions" solicited (if you feel you absolutely must contribute something for your own peace of mind, the authors of the ENABLE list ask that you make a donation on their behalf to your favorite charity). This word list is our gift to the Scrabble community, as an alternate to "official" word lists. Game designers may feel free to incorporate the WORD.LST into their games. Please mention the source and credit us as originators of the list. Note that if you, as a game designer, use the WORD.LST in your product, you may still copyright and protect your product, but you may *not* legally copyright or in any way restrict redistribution of the WORD.LST portion of your product. This *may* under law restrict your rights to restrict your users' rights, but that is only fair. It is to be expected that the maintainers of the OSPD and TWL will benefit from the research done for ENABLE. If these people incorporate portions of ENABLE into their lists, this may compromise the copyrighted proprietary status of those lists. The accuracy of the WORD.LST is due, in great part, to the herculean efforts of Alan Beale. He has put in many hours of multi-dictionary research in checking conjugations, inflections, plurals, and obscure parts of speech of thousands of words. In every sense of the word, he is as much the father of the word list as anyone. Ross Beresford (ross@bryson.demon.co.uk) has incorporated the WORD.LST from the first edition of ENABLE into his North American Scrabble version of his excellent TEA word list generation / analysis program. See his home page, http://www.bryson.demon.co.uk/, for word list info and more details of TEA. ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ WORD.LST (pronounced "word-dot-list") is the generic term for the ASCII-format word file released into the Public Domain as a standard and a reference for crossword-type games. As laptop and palmtop computers have become more common and affordable, it is convenient to use the WORD.LST in conjunction with utilities such as SEARCH.EXE and JUDGE.EXE (parts of the WORDY package) to adjudicate disputes in word game competitive play. The OSPD in its various versions and incarnations is not particularly well suited for this application as it is poorly organized, sometimes difficult to interpret, and clumsy to use (try locating the word PELVES in the printed OSPD, for example). Furthermore, the WORD.LST is free from corporate politics and agendas, scheming and conniving, committee wrangling, "politically correct" appeasement, compromising, greed, and all other such nonsense. The WORD.LST is yours, word game players! Use it. Help keep it updated and corrected. Distribute it (you do *not* need permission to do so, but tell us about it)! ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ Scrabble and OSPD are trademarks owned by Milton Bradley, a division of Hasbro. Windows is a trademark of the Microsoft Corporation. WORDY is *not* copyrighted and is *not* a trademark. It may be found under 'W' in any dictionary, just as scrabble, the verb, may be found under 'S'. The make-believe word "hasbro" may be whimsically defined as "possessing a male sibling" (named Milton, I guess). ENABLE is not a trademark. WORD.LST is not a trademark. This whole trademark business has been taken to ridiculous extremes. ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ Disclaimer: Neither I nor Alan Beale is in any way associated with the so-called "Official Dictionary Committee", nor with the NSA in any of its guises or avatars (i.e., neither the National Scrabble Association nor the National Security Agency). We did not and do not have direct access to the so-called TWL98, and the ENABLE list is not derivative from it. We do believe, however, the the ENABLE list is more thoroughly researched, more accurate, and therefore a more authoritative and generally useful replacement for the TWL98 list. ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ Important note: The supplementary archive, SUPP2K.ZIP, is a valuable adjunct to ENABLE. It supplies additional word lists, Alan Beale's "makelist" utility for combining and expurgating lists, and the must-read documentation files on word list research on plurals. The resources in this supplement make possible creating one's own "SOWPODS" list, creating custom combined lists, or even lists with "nasty words" removed, suitable for family use. ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ M\Cooper thegrendel@theriver.com http://personal.riverusers.com/~thegrendel/ ===== scowl-2020.12.07/r/enable/readme.1st ===== List of Files in the ENABLE Archive ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ WORD.LST This is the ENABLE word list for word game players. README Introduction to the ENABLE word list. ENABLE.DOC Commentary on the ENABLE word list. SIGWORD.LST List of 1024 "signature" words contained in the ENABLE2K WORD.LST. SIGWORD.DOC Commentary on the version 1 "signature" words. SIGWD2K.DOC Commentary on the "signature" words in this updated edition of ENABLE. MW10ADD.LST New words from latest edition of "Merriam Webster", 10th edition (added to WORD.LST) MW10ADD.DOC Documentation on the MW10ADD.LST list. CHECKSUM.DOC Documentation for the md5 "checksum" program. FILE_ID.DIZ Descriptor files for BBS and ftp distribution sites. VENDINFO.DIZ DESC.SDI AVEXTRA.TXT README.1ST This file. ÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜÜ The ENABLE list has been placed in the Public Domain. This means it is free and freely distributable. No fees, registrations, or "contributions" are required for its use. Note that it is strongly suggested that the SUPP2K.ZIP supplementary archive be obtained, as it contains essential additional documentation for the ENABLE list. It may be downloaded from http://personal.riverusers.com/~thegrendel/software.html M\Cooper thegrendel@theriver.com http://personal.riverusers.com/~thegrendel/ ===== scowl-2020.12.07/r/mwords/README ===== QUICK START 17 May 93 Copy all the files on all the disks to a folder on your hard disk (make sure you have at two (4) megabytes of free space on your hard disk for each disk of Moby product). Change your current directory ('CD') to that folder, type BUILD and press (enter). The files that are extracted may be viewed and edited by any capable text-editor, such as Microsoft Word 5.x. Moby (tm) Words II Documentation Notes This documentation, the software and/or database are: Copyright (c) 1988-93, Grady Ward. All Rights Reserved. 3449 Martha Ct. Arcata, CA 95521-4884 USA (707) 826-7715 (voice/24-hr 7 day FAX) grady@netcom.com License Agreement This documentation, software and/or database was developed and copyrighted by Grady Ward and is licensed, not sold, to you on a non-exclusive, non-transferable basis. The documentation, software and/or database and derivative works of this database may not be copied in whole or part except for archival purposes as provided by law. If you have purchased the commercial license, Grady Ward explicitly grants you the limited right to create and market data structures or knowledge bases derived this work without further payment of a license fee, as long as the purpose and effect of that data structure or knowledge base is other than re-distributing that Grady Ward data structure or database. (In other words, you can freely distribute data structures based upon any or all of this work as long as you take reasonable care to prevent unlicensed persons and organizations from accessing the ASCII source.) Willful copyright violations are both a civil and a criminal offense [17USC500] Disclaimer of Warranty This documentation, software and/or database is sold "as is" and without express or implied warranties as to performance or merchantability for a particular purpose.The user is advised to test the documentation, software and/or database thoroughly before relying on it. The user assumes the entire risk of using this documentation, software and/or database and any liability of seller or manufacturer will be limited to product replacement or refund of the license fee. Moby (tm) Words II for the MSDOS operating system is compressed and distributed on two 1.4MB double-sided diskettes. After self-extraction, the vocabulary files included with this product are in ordinary ASCII format with CRLF (ASCII 13/10) delimiters. MOBY WORDS II CONTENTS 354,984 single words Over 354,000 single words, excluding proper names, acronyms, or compound words and phrases. This list does not exclude archaic words or significant variant spellings. 256,772 compound words Over 256,700 hyphenated or other entries containing more than one word as well as all capitalized words and acronyms. Phrases were considered 'common' if they or variations of them occur in standard dictionaries or thesauruses. 113,809 official crosswords A list of words permitted in crossword games such as Scrabble(tm). Compatible with the first edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary(tm). Since this list has all forms: -ing, -ed, -s, and so on of words, it makes a good addition when building a custom spelling dictionary. 4,160 official crosswords delta When combined with the 113,809 crosswords file, it produces the official crossword list compatible with the second edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. (Scrabble is a registered trademark of Milton-Bradley licensed to Merriam-Webster.) 74,550 common dictionary words A list of words in common with two or more published dictionaries. This gives the developer of a custom spelling checker a good beginning pool of relatively common words. 21,986 names This database contains the most common names used in the United States and Great Britain. Spelling checkers may want to supplement their basic word list with this one. 4,946 female names frequent given names of females in English speaking countries 3,897 male names frequent given names of males in English speaking countries 10,196 places a large selection of place names in the United States 1,000 by frequency This file consists of the 1,000 most frequently used English words from a wide variety of common texts listed in decreasing order of frequency 1,000 by frequency internet This file consists of the 1,000 most frequently used English words as used on the Internet computer network in 1992. 6,213 acronyms common acronyms & abbreviations 1,185 King James Version frequent substrings The most frequently occurring 1,185 substrings in the King James Version Bible ranked and counted by order of frequency. 467 current fiction substrings The most frequently occurring 467 substrings occurring in a best-selling novel by Amy Tan in 1990. USA Constitution The Constitution of the United States, including the Bill of Rights and all amendments current to 1993. NOTE: Accents have been stripped from words, e.g., 'etude' does not mark the accent on the initial 'e'. ===== scowl-2020.12.07/r/pos/README-orig ===== QUICK START 18 May 93 Copy all the files on all the disks to a folder on your hard disk (make sure you have at least four (4) megabytes of free disk space per disk of product). Set your directory ('CD') to the new folder, type BUILD and press (enter). The files that were extracted may be viewed and manipulated by any capable text editor or word processor, such as Microsoft Word 5.x. Moby (tm) Part-of-Speech II Documentation Notes This documentation, the software and/or database are: Copyright (c) 1988-93, Grady Ward. All Rights Reserved. 3449 Martha Ct. Arcata, CA 95521-4884 USA (707) 826-7715 (voice/fax) grady@netcom.com License Agreement This documentation, software and/or database was developed and copyrighted by Grady Ward and is licensed, not sold, to you on a non-exclusive, non-transferable basis. The documentation, software and/or database and derivative works of this database may not be copied in whole or part except for archival purposes as provided by law. If you have purchased the commercial license, Grady Ward explicitly grants you the limited right to create and market data structures or knowledge bases derived this work without further payment of a license fee, as long as the purpose and effect of that data structure or knowledge base is other than redistributing that Grady Ward data structure or database. (In other words, you must make a reasonable effort to prevent unlicensed individuals and companies from accessing the source form of this data.) Willful copyright violations are both a civil and a criminal offense [17USC500] Disclaimer of Warranty This documentation, software and/or database is sold "as is" and without express or implied warranties as to performance or merchantability for a particular purpose. The user is advised to test the documentation, software and/or database thoroughly before relying on it. The user assumes the entire risk of using this documentation, software and/or database and any liability of seller or manufacturer will be limited to product replacement or refund of the license fee. Moby (tm) Part-of-Speech II for MSDOS operating systems is compressed and distributed on one HD double sided diskette. After decompression the vocabulary file included with this product is in ordinary ASCII format with CRLF (ASCII 13/10) delimiters. This second edition is a particularly thorough revision of the original Moby Part-of-Speech. Beyond the fifteen thousand new entries, many thousand more entries have been scrutinized for correctness and modernity. This is unquestionably the largest P-O-S list in the world. Note that the many included phrases means that parsing algorithms can now tokenize in units larger than a single word, increasing both speed *and* accuracy. Database Legend: Each part-of-speech vocabulary entry consists of a word or phrase field followed by a field delimiter of (ASCII 215) and the part-of-speech field that is coded using the following ASCII symbols (case is significant): Noun N Plural p Noun Phrase h Verb (usu participle) V Verb (transitive) t Verb (intransitive) i Adjective A Adverb v Conjunction C Preposition P Interjection ! Pronoun r Definite Article D Indefinite Article I Nominative o This two-part vocabulary record is delimited from others with CRLF (ASCII 13/10). For example, engineer Nt means that the word engineer has two main uses in English; the principal part-of-speech is as a noun "That engineer could write in microcode with one hand and in ADA with the other" and its secondary part-of-speech is as a transitive verb: "We sure engineered that software to death." In many cases, the -ed, -ing, -ly, and -ic forms of words are not explicitly listed; the participle forms of verbs will be usually marked simply with the V sign rather than the more specific t or i symbols. Words such as "be," which often have more than one head entry in a dictionary, have one listing with all the parts-of-speech for all senses concatenated. Foreign words commonly used in English usually include their diacritical marks, for example, the acute accent e is denoted by ASCII 142. ===== scowl-2020.12.07/r/pos/README ===== Part Of Speech Database July 23, 2000 Compiled by Kevin Atkinson The part-of-speech.txt file contains is a combination of "Moby (tm) Part-of-Speech II" and the WordNet database. The latest version can be found at http://aspell.sourceforge.net/wl/. The format of each entry is Where the POS tag is one or more of the following: N Noun P Plural h Noun Phrase V Verb (usu participle) t Verb (transitive) i Verb (intransitive) A Adjective v Adverb C Conjunction P Preposition ! Interjection r Pronoun D Definite Article I Indefinite Article o Nominative The parts of speech before any '|' (if at all) come from the original Moby database. Anything after the '|' comes from the WordNet database. The part of speech tags from the original Moby database are in priority order where the principle usage is listed first. The ones from the WordNet database are not. Entries from the moby database have had any accents removed, the "ae" character expanded, the pound, yen, and peseta sign converted to a '$' and the CP437 character 0xBE replaced with a '~'. CREATION The C++ program used to create the database is also included for those of you are interested. The WordNet database will require a bit of preprocessing with the following command: cat POS.lst | sed -n 's/\([^ ][^ ]*\) /\1/p' | tr '_' ' ' > noun.POS The paths will also need to be changed in order to get it to run. COPYRIGHT The Moby database was explicitly pleased in the public domain: The Moby lexicon project is complete and has been place into the public domain. Use, sell, rework, excerpt and use in any way on any platform. Placing this material on internal or public servers is also encouraged. The compiler is not aware of any export restrictions so freely distribute world-wide. You can verify the public domain status by contacting Grady Ward 3449 Martha Ct. Arcata, CA 95521-4884 grady@netcom.com grady@northcoast.com The WordNet database is under the following Copyright: This software and database is being provided to you, the LICENSEE, by Princeton University under the following license. By obtaining, using and/or copying this software and database, you agree that you have read, understood, and will comply with these terms and conditions.: Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute this software and database and its documentation for any purpose and without fee or royalty is hereby granted, provided that you agree to comply with the following copyright notice and statements, including the disclaimer, and that the same appear on ALL copies of the software, database and documentation, including modifications that you make for internal use or for distribution. WordNet 1.6 Copyright 1997 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. THIS SOFTWARE AND DATABASE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND PRINCETON UNIVERSITY MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. BY WAY OF EXAMPLE, BUT NOT LIMITATION, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF MERCHANT- ABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR THAT THE USE OF THE LICENSED SOFTWARE, DATABASE OR DOCUMENTATION WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY THIRD PARTY PATENTS, COPYRIGHTS, TRADEMARKS OR OTHER RIGHTS. The name of Princeton University or Princeton may not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software and/or database. Title to copyright in this software, database and any associated documentation shall at all times remain with Princeton University and LICENSEE agrees to preserve same. I assign no additional copyright to the combined database and the software is explicitly being pleased in the public domain. However, I would appreciate credit for my work. ===== scowl-2020.12.07/r/special/README ===== This directory contains numerous special word list which I have created myself. abbreviations: A list of commonly used abbreviations and acronyms, especially in conversational text such as email. abbreviations-also: Some additional abbreviations which I did not want to include at the lower word list sizes. frequent: A combination of the two top 1000 lists found in the mwords package. I carefully went though and weeded out words which where an artifact of the corpus used. letters: A list of single letters and there inflected forms names.from_alan_beale: A list of names (version 5.2) sent to be by Alan Beale : I have a large list of proper names, whose origins are in the linux-words proper names, but which both removes a lot of (what I considered to be) junk entries, and adds a lot of names of various sorts, notably names of commercial products and noteworthy historical personages. never-abbreviations: A list of words that I do not consider abbreviations. never-variant: A list of words I do not consider variants. not-possessive: A list of nouns which should not take a possessive form with "'s". proper-names: A list of additional proper names. roman-numerals: A list of roman numerous originally extracted from the ispell word lists. signature.35: A small list of words that I thought really ought to be at the 35 level. signature.??: Additional words to add at the respective level. marco-alan.??: Words Marco A.G.Pinto proposed to add that Alan Beale also thought should be added. Words with 3 stars or more (see app.aspell.net:/lookup-freq) are added at the 60 and others at the 70 level. mozilla-alan.60: Words found in the Mozilla dictionary than Alan also approved of. extra.??: Non-signature words suggested for inclusion by others that are recognized by most dictionaries but not all that common. macro-alan.70: Words Marco A.G.Pinto and Alan Beale though should be added that I (Kevin Atkinson) for one reason or another didn't want to add at the 60 level. The most likely reasons are that the word is too similar to a more common word or a compound word that is normally spelled as two words or with a hyphen. macro.80: Words that are Macro added to en_GB not in one of the above lists. unix-terms: A list of commonly used unix terms often used as regular english words by geeks. variant: A list of words which the 12dicts package does not consider variants but I do. not-upper: Normal words that just happen to start with an uppercase words and have no relation to a proper name, for example OK AWOL 2800-ptr: Words from "2800 Personality Trait Descriptors" (1967), see https://sourceforge.net/p/wordlist/issues/60/ exclude.??: Words to exclude up to the specified level (and hence bump them to the next level.) Used mostly for obscure words that are very similar to a far more common word and hence could mask the misspelling of the more common word. hacker-exclude: List of words found in the hacker category that are not found anywhere in Google Book's corpus (1980-2008) and thus should in all likelihood not be included considering "words" such as FTPing, grepped, etc. are in the corpus. prefixes: Common prefixes that are often followed used with a dash. For example "multi-". Note "pre" is left out as it is too close to "per" which is more common. phrase-parts: Parts of common (generally Latin) phrases that are not normal words themselfs. australian.35: A list of extra Australian words added at the 35 level to the "australian" spelling category. chinese-names: chinese-names.also: A list of Chinese names from https://github.com/en-wl/wordlist/issues/203. The ".also" file contains two word names I have not decided how to process. cs.60 Common words found in Software Development and Computer Science contexes. urban-areas: U.S Urban areas as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau. Source https://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/reference/ua/ua_list_ua.txt (2019-08). australian-towns: australian-towns-part: List of cities in Australia from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Australia_by_population (2019-09-24). neol2020: A small list of Neologisms sent to be by Alan. ===== scowl-2020.12.07/r/ukacd/readme.txt ===== The UK Advanced Cryptics Dictionary A word list for crossword solvers and setters by Ross Beresford Version 1.7 23 August 2000 Copyright (c) J Ross Beresford 1993-2000 All Rights Reserved The UK Advanced Cryptics Dictionary is a FREEWARE package: it can be freely copied and distributed under the terms of the licensing agreement at the end of this document. The author can be reached in the following ways: Internet address ross@bryson.demon.co.uk Postal address 10 Wagtail Close Twyford Reading RG10 9ED United Kingdom INTRODUCTION ------------ The UKACD is a word list compiled for the crossword community. In particular, it's intended for setters and solvers of advanced cryptic crosswords in the UK; for example, the Listener Crossword and the barred puzzles in the Sunday broadsheets. Although there are many word lists in the public domain, none is well suited for use with crossword construction and word search software. This freely distributable list should be more helpful, as it is specifically intended for use with crossword software. The list will be updated at periodic intervals to correct errors and make additions. The UKACD is in the ISO 8859-1 character set (compatible with the Windows ANSI character set), with a single entry per line. EDITORIAL POLICY ---------------- The original basis for the UKACD was a word list of some 500,000 entries, compiled from public domain sources. This was reduced to a list of around 190,000 words by eliminating entries that aren't generally allowable in UK advanced cryptic puzzles. The list continues to be improved as missing entries are discovered and added. A new update is issued when several thousand entries have been added since the previous one. The vocabulary included in the following single volume UK English dictionaries is used as a guide to acceptability: The Chambers Dictionary Collins English Dictionary The Concise Oxford Dictionary Words are given in all their inflected forms, where appropriate. That is, nouns are given in their plural form(s); verbs are given as the infinitive, third person singular, present and past participle; and the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives are included where they are reasonably common. Common proper names are included, as they are often found in crosswords, even though only Collins of the above dictionaries has a systematic coverage of them. Some very common words not to be found in any of the dictionaries are also included. To make the list more useful for compiling jumbo grids, longer non-dictionary entries are being added. These include: well-known quotations and proverbs; fictional characters and book titles; films, pieces of music and works of art. Some attempt is made to standardise the punctuation and capitalisation of entries; in particular, by ensuring all proper names start with a capital letter. However, no great effort is put into this, as it only marginally affects the usefulness of the list to crossworders. Dictionary entries only differing in punctuation, accenting or capitalisation are folded onto the single most common form. This is done to save space and, again makes little difference to the value of the UKACD to setters and solvers. FEEDBACK -------- If you find any errors, or have suggestions for additions, please e-mail or post them to me at the address on the first page of this document. Provided they are within the scope of the UKACD, as defined under EDITORIAL POLICY, they will be included in the next release of the word list. LICENSING INFORMATION --------------------- Copyright (c) J Ross Beresford 1993-2000. All Rights Reserved. The following restriction is placed on the use of this publication: if The UK Advanced Cryptics Dictionary is used in a software package or redistributed in any form, the copyright notice must be prominently displayed and the text of this document must be included verbatim. There are no other restrictions: I would like to see the list distributed as widely as possible. ===== scowl-2020.12.07/r/README ===== This directory contains the source of the raw data. In order for the word lists to compile you will need to unpack all of the various word lists in the proper directory. If you checkout SCOWL using git this should be done for you automatically. The following word lists, which are created or distributed by me, are available at http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/. varcon: Variant Conversion Info (VARCON) infl: Inflection Database pos: Part of Speech Database alt12dicts: Unofficial Alternate 12 Dicts Package special: Special words lists that I added myself. Nothing needs to be downloaded for this directory. Plus the following additinal word list from various locations. census: 1990 Census Name Files http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names/ https://github.com/en-wl/wordlist/raw/cbd0e208/other/census-names-1990.zip enable: Updated millennial edition of ENABLE (ENABLE2K) http://personal.riverusers.com/~thegrendel/enable2k.zip http://members.tripod.com/~the_grendel/enable2k.zip https://github.com/en-wl/wordlist/raw/cbd0e208/other/enable2k.zip enable-sup: Updated ENABLE SUPPLEMENT http://personal.riverusers.com/~thegrendel/supp2k.zip http://members.tripod.com/~the_grendel/supp2k.zip https://github.com/en-wl/wordlist/raw/cbd0e208/other/supp2k.zip https://github.com/en-wl/wordlist/raw/c50231ce/other/supp2k-nopos.lst mwords: The Moby Words Package. http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research/ilash/Moby/ ftp://sable.ox.ac.uk/pub/wordlists/Moby/ https://github.com/en-wl/wordlist/raw/cbd0e208/other/mwords.tar.gz uk-freq-class: UK English Wordlist With Frequency Classification April 2002 http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/bck1/menu.html https://github.com/en-wl/wordlist/raw/cbd0e208/other/wlist.html.gz ukacd: The UK Advanced Cryptics Dictionary (UKACD) https://github.com/en-wl/wordlist/raw/cbd0e208/other/ukacd17.zip yawl: Updated Y2K version of YAWL http://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/libs/yawl-0.2.tar.gz http://personal.riverusers.com/~thegrendel/yawl-0.2.tar.gz https://github.com/en-wl/wordlist/raw/cbd0e208/other/yawl-0.2.tar.gz ===== scowl-2020.12.07/r/jargon-wl/README ===== Unofficial Jargon File Word Lists Ver 4.2.0-1 2000/08/17 This archive contains some useful word lists created from the Jargon file: pos.txt Part of speech information for the entries in the Jargon file. Each entry has the form: \t Where pos is a combination of: N Noun P Plural V Verb t Verb (transitive) i Verb (intransitive) A Adjective v Adverb C Conjunction P Preposition ! Interjection infl.txt Inflected forms of entries in the Jargon file created from the make-infl script in AGID (aspell.sourceforge.net/wl/). Note, this file has not been very carefully hand checked so it may contain errors. word.lst A list of single words in the Jargon file and their inflected forms, as given by infl.txt, that are also generally considered real words. common.lst A list of single words, and their inflected forms, that are labeled as very common in the jargon file or considered common by me. This list does not including any of the words that are in word.lst already. common-base.lst Same as above but does not included the inflected forms. Used to create the above. other.lst The list of all other single words, and their inflected forms, that are not already in word.lst or common.lst how.txt proc.pl infl-proc.pl expand.pl How the files were created and the scripts used to do so. ===== scowl-2020.12.07/r/yawl/README ===== Yet Another Word List [YAWL] i The List Why indeed is there even a need for Yet Another Word List? The notorious "linux.words" list, the public domain "Websters 2", the ispell and cracklib dictionaries, not to mention various and sundry purported Scrabble lists are already available in electronic form. None of these, though, are optimized for word game use and as comprehensive as the YAWL. At 263,533 words, this list subsumes the SOWPODS list beloved of international Scrabble players. There is no arbitrary word length cutoff, and even words longer than 20 letters find a place in the list. Care has been taken to ensure that the YAWL word list (word.list) will for all time remain copyright free. It is based on the updated Public Domain ENABLE (Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon), researched and compiled by the author and his colleague, Alan Beale. The ENABLE list has become a sort of de facto on-line standard for word gaming, having been adopted by Scrabble servers and used as the basis for at least one commercial word game. Additional content in the list came from Alan Beale's painstakingly researched "2DICTS" and "OSPDADD" lists, an "OSW" clone list generously contributed by the amateur lexicographer, C.M.L. Wristlock, David Duffy's list of Australian bird names, and a short list of computer jargon oriented "signature words" added by the author of this package. While there might be suspicions of arbitrariness in the choice of words these signature words, they add a pungent, slightly smoky idiosyncratic flavor to the brew. Those who, in spite of themselves, develop an asthetic appreciation of the YAWL package are urged to download the lists it is based on, in the ENABLE2K and SUPP2K archives, from http://personal.riverusers.com/~thegrendel/software.html. These archives contain Alan Beale's erudite, but eminently readable research notes, a treat for the amateur lexicographer. The YAWL word list itself (word.list) is, of course, in standard UNIX ASCII format, one word per line, terminated by an LF. Those unfortunate Windows persons desiring a DOS ASCII word file, lines terminated by an LF-CR, can download the "tofrodos" package from http://chrisheng.hypermart.net/ or http://thor.prohosting.com/~cslheng/, which contains both 16 and 32-bit Windows executables for converting text files from UNIX to DOS format. The YAWL list, word.list, is herewith and forever placed in the Public Domain, which means there are no restrictions on its use and redistribution for "lawful" purposes. This means you may not use the list to rob banks or swindle investors, but short of that, pretty much anything goes. If you decide to incorporate the list into a game, application, or product, the author requests, as a courtesy, notification of same, so that he can gain a moment's satisfaction in return for all the effort he has put into this project. ii The Utilities This new version of the YAWL package now includes two simple anagramming utilities. They are interesting and useful in their own right, but their true purpose is to inspire all the Linux word gamers and coders out there to invent and create... word games, using the YAWL list, of course. It would truly be nice to see a successor to Scrabble - a new generation word game with strategic depth, a word game with some of the sheer crystalline beauty of chess and the sheer profundity of Go, a word game rewarding artistic play rather than dry list memorization, a word game for those who truly love the richness of the English language and revel in its peculiar permutations, a word game that will take the gaming community by storm, a word game that will invade living rooms all across the civilized world, in short, a word game fated to run on millions of Linux machines. Using 'anagram' involves nothing more than typing, from the command line (console or xterm), 'anagram letter-set [dictionary]'. Omitting the [dictionary] defaults to the YAWL list, installed by this package as "word.list" in /usr/dict. Omitting the letter set causes the program to prompt the user for input. The letter set may include "wild cards" (blank tiles), which are represented as underscores (_). The output goes to stdout, and may, of course be redirected to a file. Examples: anagram lkwa ------------ al aw awl ka la law walk anagram whea_l -------------- aa aah aal ab able ace ache ... and 459 other words. anagram abcd /usr/dict/linux.words ---------------------------------- anagrams the letterset "abcd" using /usr/dict/linux.words. The multiple word anagram utility, "multi" works similarly. The syntax, from the command line, is: multi [letter set] [number of words] [word file] Example: multi abcdefghij 3 ------------------ bach fed jig bach jig fed bad chef jig ... bid chef jag ... jab chef dig ...and 49 other combinations. Using "multi" can provide some cheap thrills when a party gets dull. Both "anagram" and "multi" have their own man pages, installed by a "make install". It would take only a few small tweaks to transform the anagram code into an unscramble tool for "scramblegrams" or even a "find the missing letters" utility for crossword puzzle fans. This is left as an "exercise for the reader". Mendel Cooper thegrendel@theriver.com -- Scrabble is a registered trademark of Milton Bradley, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. ENABLE, YAWL, and 2DICTS are not trademarks. ===== scowl-2020.12.07/r/yawl/LICENSE ===== LICENSE The YAWL list, word.list, is in the Public Domain. There are no restrictions on its use or distribution. The author decided to release the list into the Public Domain because it is based primarily on other Public Domain lists by the author and his colleague, Alan Beale, and applying the stricter GPL to it would therefore be of doubtful validity. The author has also released the source code to "anagram" and "multi" (multiple word anagram) into the Public Domain. He had previously posted these utilities on the "alt.sources" newsgroup in shar archive form. Please feel free to use the word list and/or source code in your own projects. It is, in fact, the intent of the author that this package inspire word game software for the Linux platform. If you use any portion of YAWL, please, as a courtesy, give credit to its author. ===== scowl-2020.12.07/r/enable-sup/readme ===== WHY ARE THESE WORD LISTS DIFFERENT FROM OTHER LISTS? Alan Beale painstakingly compiled the word lists in this package based on the appearance of words in standard dictionaries. This would appear to be similar to the work of Official Word List Committee (the one affiliated with a certain anagramming board game players association and a certain large toy corporation). The difference is that Alan documented his work, and the documentation is here for all to see. His lucid documentation is, in many ways, more interesting than the word lists themselves. Anagramming can be a addictive activity. Yet, what brings it truly alive is a passion for language, for the words themselves, for their meaning and derivation, for their essence. As a purely mechanical exercise in letter permutation, anagramming reduces to a dry-as-dust intellectual exercise, and one in which brute-force computer algorithms are superior to even the most talented humans. This is why it's so important to dig beneath the superficial letter patterns, and why a printed unannotated list (even with "official" imprimatur) is, at best, a tool with a dull edge. Hence, these lists. Mendel Cooper ===== scowl-2020.12.07/r/varcon/README ===== Variant Conversion Info (VarCon) ******************************** Version 2020.12.07 Copyright 2000-2020 by Kevin Atkinson (kevina@gnu.org) and Benjamin Titze (btitze@protonmail.ch). This package contains information to convert between American, British, Canadian, and Australian spellings and vocabulary as well as other variant information. The latest version can be found at http://wordlist.aspell.net/. File Format =========== The main data file is varcon.txt. It contains information on the preferred American, British, Canadian and Australian spelling of a word as well as other variant information. Varcon Lines ------------ Each line contains a mapping between the various spellings of a word. Words are tagged to indicate where the spelling is used, and each word/tag pair is separated with a " / ". For example in the line: A Cv: acknowledgment / Av B C: acknowledgement "acknowledgment" and "acknowledgement" are two spellings of the same word and "A", "Cv", "B", etc are the tags. Tags are separated by spaces and the group of tags is separated from the word with a ": ". Here, "acknowledgment" is the preferred American spelling (as indicated by the "A") of the word, and "acknowledgement" is the preferred Canadian and British spelling ("B" and "C"). However the American spelling is sometimes used in Canada (as indicated by "Cv", where the lowercase "v" indicated a variant form) and the British spelling is sometimes used in America (as indicated the "Av"). More generally each tag consists of a spelling category (for example "A") followed possible by a variant indicator. The spelling categories are as follows: A: American B: British "ise" spelling Z: British "ize" spelling or OED preferred Spelling C: Canadian D: Australian _: Other (Variant info based on American dictionaries, never used with any of the above). and the variants tags are as follows: .: equal v: variant V: seldom used variant -: possible variant, should generally not used x: improper variant (should not use) The "." or equal variant tags are reserved for special cases when there is little agreement between dictionaries or when I think the dictionary is wrong. The "v" indicator is used for most words marked as variants in the dictionary. However, some variants will be demoted to a "V". For example, if the variant is marked as "also" by Merriam-Webster, or also if only some dictionaries acknowledge the existence the variant. "-" is used when the variant is generally not listed is the dictionary but I could find some evidence of its use, or when it is marked as an archaic spelling for the word. The "x" is used when the spelling is almost generally considered a misspelling, and is only included for completeness. For Australian English "v" was used for variants that are widely used, but not preferred, and "V" for all "-or" (vs. "-our") variants and variants considered "chiefly US". If there are no tags with the 'Z' spelling category on the line then 'B' implies 'Z'. Similarly if there are no 'C' tags then 'Z' implies 'C'. If there are no 'D' tags then 'B' implies 'D'. Some entries may have a number after the tags, this is a column number and will be explained later. Varcon Clusters --------------- For ease of reading and maintaining the data file, each line is grouped in a cluster of closely related words. Each cluster is uniquely identified by a headword, which is generally the American spelling of word on the first line of the cluster. Each cluster is started with a '#' and is followed by the headword with some additional information after it. For example the cluster for acknowledgment is: # acknowledgment (level 35) A Cv: acknowledgment / Av B C: acknowledgement A Cv: acknowledgments / Av B C: acknowledgements A Cv: acknowledgment's / Av B C: acknowledgement's The "" tag will be explained latter, and "(level 35)" indicate what level in SCOWL (see http://wordlist.sourceforge.net) the headword is found in. The levels generally mean the following: <= 35: Very common word <= 70: Can be found in the dictionary 80: Likely a valid word, can likely be found in an unabridged dictionary > 80: May not even be a legal word Earlier versions of varcon contained numerous errors. With version 5.0 massive effort has been made to correct many of these errors. Clusters that have undergone some form of verification (and likely correction) are marked with "". As of version 5.0, most clusters with headwords word in common usage (SCOWL level 35 and below) should now be checked, as well as many others. No effort was made to check clusters with headwords in SCOWL level 80 and above; many of those entries are unlikely to be in the dictionary anyway. Varcon Groups ------------- Sometimes the spelling of a word depends on the usage in which case a cluster is split into multiple groups with each group represting one usage of a word. Usage annotations and/or pos tags are used to distinguish one group from another. Usage information is given after a " | ". For example here is part of the cluster for prize: A B: prize | reward A B: prizes | reward A C: prize / B: prise | otherwise A C: prizes / B: prises | otherwise which indicated than the preferred spelling of prize is always with a "z" when meaning a reward, but otherwise is spelled with a "s" is British English. In the example above a brief definition of the word is given, but often no such attempt is made, and the definition simply consists of a number, for example: A B: sake | :1 A C: sake / Av B Cv: saki | :2 A part-of-speech (POS) tag may also given after a " | ", for example: A B C: practice / AV Cv: practise | A Cv: practice / AV B C: practise | POS tags are always given in the form "" and if a definition is also given the POS info is always first. The POS tags used are as follows: : Noun : Verb : Adjective : Adverb : Adjective or Adverb Additional Annotations ---------------------- A "(-)" before the definition indicated a rarely used or archaic form of a word, for example: A B: bark | :1 A: bark / Av B: barque | (-) ship A "| -- pl: someword" indicates that the word is a plural and the root is someword. A plain "| -- pl" indicates that the word is a plural and the root is elsewhere within the group. It is used when one form of the plural is the same as the root word, for example: _1: yak | :1 _ 1: yaks / _V 1: yak | :1 | -- pl _ 1: yak's | :1 A "| --" otherwise indicates a note which gives additional context but does not create it's own group like a definition does. A "#" after a line indicates a comment that is often used to indicate why. A "##" after a cluster indicates the the comment applies to the entire cluster, for example: # coloration (level 50) A B C: coloration / B. Cv: colouration A B C: colorations / B. Cv: colourations A B C: coloration's / B. Cv: colouration's ## OED has coloration as the preferred spelling and discolouration as a ## variant for British Engl or some reason In the comments ODE (not to be confused with OED) stands for Oxford Dictionary of English, "Ox" is used for any Oxford dictionary, and "M-W" for Merriam-Webster. Varcon Columns -------------- Varcon does not directly expresses the relation of words within a group as it is normally easy to derive. For example given a simple group of: A: acknowledgment / B: acknowledgement A: acknowledgments / B: acknowledgements A: acknowledgment's / B: acknowledgement's it is clear that acknowledgments is the plural form of acknowledgment since they are both the American spelling of a word. While acknowledgEments is the plural form of acknowledgEment since they are both the British forms of a word. Within a group each varcon line is considered a row in a table and each entry within a line is considered a column. Within this group the first column is the American spelling and the second is the British. Sometime the column assignment unclear, when they are explicit column numbers may be given. For example: A B: caulk / Av: calk / AV Bv 1: caulking / AV 2: calking | :3 A B: caulks / Av: calks / AV Bv 1: caulkings / AV 2: calkings | :3 A B: caulk's / Av: calk's / AV Bv 1: caulking's / AV 2: calking's | :3 Each column must contain exactly one spelling of the base form of a word, however a column may contain multiple derived forms for a single spelling of the base form, for example: A B D 1: amoeba / Av Dv 2: ameba A B D 1: amoebas / Av Bv Dv 1: amoebae / Av Dv 2: amebas / Av Dv 2: amebae A B D 1: amoeba's / Av Dv 2: ameba's Additional Files ================ The file variant-also.tab contains additional mappings between various spellings of a word which are not yet in varcon.txt. No attempt is made to distinguish the primary form of a word. The file variant-infl.tab is like variant-also.tab except that it is created automatically from the AGID inflection database. The file variant-wroot.tab is like variant-infl.tab except that it also included the root form of the word. The file voc.tab is similar to varcon.txt but converts between vocabulary instead of spelling. Unlike varcon.tab it is a simple tab separated file with the fields corresponding to the American, British, and Canadian words. If more than one word if often used to describe the same thing the words are separated with commas. The last column contains additional notes on when the word is used. Unlike varcon.txt it is generally not suitable for automatic conversion. The "make-variant" Perl script will combine varcon.txt, variant-also.tab, and variant-infl.tab into one huge mapping and will output the result to "variant.tab". If the "no-infl" option is given than variant-infl.tab will not be included. The "split" script will split out the information in varcon.txt into several word lists named as follows: [-v][-uncommon].lst where is one of: american, british, british_z, canadian, common, or other. "common" is used for words which appear in varcon.txt, yet are used in all versions of english, such as "prize", and "other" is used for the "_" spelling category. The mapping from the variant indicators in varcon.txt to the numeric variant level is as follows: v => 0 V => 1 - => 2 "-uncommon" is used for forms marked with "(-)" as already described. The "translate" Perl script will translate a text file from one spelling to another. Its usage is: translate [] is any of -?,-h,--help this screen -m,--mark mark words where the translation is questionable -i,--include include words where the translation is questionable is the file name of the translation array, defaults to "abbc.tab". and are one of: american, british, british_z, or canadian. british-ise and british-ize can also be used. Text is read in from standard input and is outputted to standard out. Words are marked with a '?' before and after the questionable word when the option is enabled. The file varcon.pm contains some library routines for parsing varcon.txt and is used by many of the scripts above. Feedback ======== If you discover any errors in these mappings or have suggestions for additions please file a bug report at https://github.com/kevina/wordlist/issues, or alternatively email me directly at kevina@gnu.org, but I will likely tell you to file a bug report so that I don't forget about it. Sources ======= These mappings were compiled from numerous sources. The abc.tab was originally created from the American and British word lists found in the Ispell distribution and the Canadian word list created by Garst R. Reese : What I have discovered is that Canadian is a modification of British. Canadians use ize ization, izing izable like Americans, and gram instead of gramme. The one exception I found was practise. It does not go to practize. Otherwise they use British spelling. So, what I am currently checking books with is a an edited version of British, where I have changed all occurrences of ise to ize, isab to izab, isation to ization, ising to izing, and gramme to gram except I allow programme, which is sometimes proper unless you are talking about a computer program. I did bunches of greps to be sure these substitutions would work as expected. Many other words have been added to abc.tab which were not in the original Ispell word lists. Many different web sources were consulted when crating the tables. They include: The American-British British-American Dictionary http://www.peak.org/~jeremy/dictionary/dictionary.html American and British Spelling Differences http://www.peak.org/~jeremy/dictionary/spellcat.html Dave (VE7CNV)'s Truly Canadian Dictionary of Canadian Spelling http://www.luther.bc.ca/~dave7cnv/cdnspelling/cdnspelling.html Canadian Spelling Convention http://imej.wfu.edu/articles/1999/1/02/demo/tutorial/canas.html Cornerstone's Canadian English Page http://www.web.net/cornerstone/cdneng.htm Inter-Play Translation: British/Canadian/American Spelling http://www.inter-play.com/translation/spel-ukus.htm Inter-Play Translation: British/Canadian/American Vocabulary http://www.inter-play.com/translation/voc-ukus.htm As well as several online dictionaries: Marriam-Webster: http://www.m-w.com/ American Heritage: http://www.bartleby.com/61/ Cambridge (ESL): http://dictionary.cambridge.org/ In version 5.0 a massive effort to correct the numerous errors in VarCon was done. The primary sources used for verification were: Marriam-Webster: http://www.m-w.com/ Free version of Oxford Dictionaries Online: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/ Oxford dictionaries available via Oxford Reference Online (subscription service, http://www.oxfordreference.com/): The New Oxford American Dictionary (2nd edition, 2006) and sometimes: The Oxford American Dictionary of Current English (2002) The Concise Oxford English Dictionary (11th edition revised, 2008) and sometimes: The Oxford Dictionary of English (2nd edition revised, 2005) The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (2004) I also used Tysto UK vs US spelling list available at: http://www.tysto.com/articles05/q1/20050324uk-us.shtml to make sure I didn't leave out any information in VarCon, however any additions from his lists where verified using the dictionaries mentioned above as his lists contained numerous errors (such as including archaic spellings of words) I also made indirect use of Luke's Canadian, British and American Spelling page available at: http://www.lukemastin.com/testing/spelling/cgi-bin/database.cgi?database=spelling but only to perform some initial verification, in the end I rechecked his data using the dictionaries above. (However, his data is, by far, more accurate than Tysto's) In Version 2016.11.20 Benjamin Titze added support for Australian English. The primary sources for this addition were: The Macquarie Dictionary: https://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/ Style Manual: For Authors, Editors and Printers, 6th Edition. DCITA. University of Technology Sydney Publications Style Guide: http://www.gsu.uts.edu.au/publications/styleguide/spelling.html Style Manual, Department of Treasury and Finance, Tasmania: http://conference.tasa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Style-Manual.pdf Editor Australia - Style Guide: http://www.editoraustralia.com/styleguide_spelling.html Webster in Australia (history of "our"/"or" spelling variants): http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/elac/2008/01/webster_in_australia.html Changelog ========= From 2018.10.06 to 2020.12.07 - Additional documentation on file format - Minor change in file format - Fix scripts to work with modern versions of Perl. - Various new entries - Additional cleanups From 2017.08.24 to 2019.10.06 - Added entries for: eukaryote, prokaryote, virtualization, volcanism From 2016.11.20 to 2017.08.24 - Typo fixes thanks to Jakub Wilk From 2016.06.26 to 2016.11.20 - New Australian spelling category thanks to the work of Benjamin Titze. - Various other fixes. From 2016.01.19 to 2016.06.26 - Fix plural of "bus". From 2015.08.24 to 2016.01.19 - Undo the effects of PERL_UNICODE in the translate script. - Other minor fixes and new entries. From 2014.02.15 to 2015.08.24 (Aug 24, 2015) - Added entry for Koran/Koranic. - Tweaked "adviser" cluster. - Fix formatting problems. From 2015.01.28 to 2014.02.15 (February 15, 2015) - Various new entries From 2014.11.17 to 2015.01.28 (January 28, 2015) - Minor adjustments to a few entries (analytic, amid) - Added entry for shareable - Remove a junk entry (ted/taed). From 2014.08.11 to 2014.11.17 (November 17, 2014) - Fix typos in README - Enhancement to VarCon translate script. It will now, by default, filter clusters with a SCOWL level > 80. This behavior can be controlled with the new "--thresh" option. - Remove a few junk entries. From Revision 5.1 to Version 2014.08.11 (August 8, 2014) - Various corrections. Most of them minor. Two notable exceptions: - Added an entry for furor as the correct British spelling is furore - Fixed racket entries as Canadians still use racquet even though it is a British English (at least according to the Oxford dictionaries) - Other minor changes. From Revision 5.0 to Revision 5.1 (January 6, 2010) - Corrected numerous errors after running various forms of verification on varcon.txt. - Reordered the clusters in varcon.txt so that they are mostly in alphabetic order based on the headword. From Revision 4.1 to Revision 5.0 (December 27, 2010) - Completely new format for the main table which, in addition to providing the preferred spelling of a word for various forms of English, also records variant and other information. To reflect this change, the name of the file was renamed from abbc.tab to varcon.txt. - Massive effort to verify the variant information against authoritative sources (mainly Oxford dictionaries). Most entries for common words (SCOWL level 35 and below) have been checked against at least a British and Canadian dictionary. - Added variant information for numerous other words, even when there is no difference between the various forms on English. - Other changes corresponding to the new format. From Revision 4 to Revision 4.1 (August 10, 2004) - Fixed various errors in abbc.tab - Removed clause 4 from the Ispell copyright with permission of Geoff Kuenning. From Revision 3 to Revision 4 (August 7, 2004) - Added a column to "abc.tab" for the British "ize" spelling and renamed the file to abbc.tab. - Added verb forms of prize/prise to abbc.tab, removed from variant-also.tab From Revision 2 to Revision 3 (January 2, 2003) - Added an option for not including variant-infl.tab for the make-variant perl script - Added the file variant-wroot.tab - Added a few entries given to me by Francis Bond and Edward Betts From Revision 1 to Revision 2 (January 27, 2001) - Removed all "B" markers because I could not find any evidence for them - Corrected a few Canadian entries, especially those with the "B" markers - Added some more entries by trying fixed changes (such as ize to ise) to words in SCOWL and hand-checking over the ones with semi-common words in them. - Added variant-infl.tab Copyright ========= Copyright 2000-2019 by Kevin Atkinson Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute and sell this array, the associated software, and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice appears in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation. Kevin Atkinson makes no representations about the suitability of this array for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty. Copyright 2016 by Benjamin Titze Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute and sell this array, the associated software, and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice appears in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation. Benjamin Titze makes no representations about the suitability of this array for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty. Since the original words lists come from the Ispell distribution: Copyright 1993, Geoff Kuenning, Granada Hills, CA All rights reserved. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. 3. All modifications to the source code must be clearly marked as such. Binary redistributions based on modified source code must be clearly marked as modified versions in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. (clause 4 removed with permission from Geoff Kuenning) 5. The name of Geoff Kuenning may not be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission. THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY GEOFF KUENNING AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL GEOFF KUENNING OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE. ===== scowl-2020.12.07/r/alt12dicts/README-orig ===== Version 6 of the 12dicts word lists Welcome to version 6 of 12dicts, a collection of English word lists. It differs in several important ways from most of the other free word lists you can download. • The 12dicts lists are oriented towards common words. If you're looking for myriads of archaic, scientific or computer jargon words, you should look elsewhere. • The 12dicts lists have been rigorously checked for errors. (This is not to say that they are error-free, merely that enough care has been taken that errors are rather infrequent.) • 12dicts contains a variety of lists, of different sizes and characteristics. One size does not fit all. Because each list has different characteristics, I do not recommend combining them, except as noted below. Originally, 12dicts was composed of lists derived from a specific set of 12 source dictionaries. In addition to these "classic" lists, 12dicts now includes lists derived from other sources. It would perhaps be appropriate to rename 12dicts to something more generic, such as BAWL (Beale's Assorted Word Lists), but I have not done so in order to preserve continuity. The remainder of this document is organized as follows: • This release • Some general observations • The organization of 12dicts • Picking a list to use • The classic (American) 12dicts lists □ The 6of12 and 2of12 lists □ The 2of12inf list □ The 3esl list • The international 12dicts lists □ The 2of4brif list □ The 3of6 lists □ The 5d+2a list • The lemmatized 12dicts lists □ The 2+2+3lem list □ The 2+2+3frq list □ The 2+2+3cmn list • Specialized 12dicts lists □ The neol2016 list □ The 2of5core list □ The 6phrase list • How 12dicts came to be • My other projects • Conclusions This release This is release 6.0.1 of 12dicts, released April 2016. This is a major release. The following is a brief rundown of the changes and additions: • A number of new lists, based on 6 "advanced learner's" ESL dictionaries, have been added. The sources are reasonably balanced between American and British English. In addition to 3of6game.txt and 3of6all.txt, which are more or less traditional word lists, 6phrase.txt, a list of multi-word phrases, was added. • The 5desk.txt list has been augmented with words from two of the advanced learner's dictionaries, and renamed 5d+2a.txt to reflect this change. • The lemmatized lists have been augmented by adding words from the new advanced learner list 3of6game.txt along with some commonly-used hyphenated words from both 2of12.txt and 3of6all.txt. These lists have been renamed from 2+2lemma.txt and 2+2gfreq.txt to 2+2+3lem.txt and 2+2+3frq.txt to reflect this change. • Word frequency information for the lemmatized frequency list is now obtained from a BYU corpus-derived frequency list rather than from Google web data. A small number of abbreviations and proper names have been added to the list. • Two new small lists of especially common or important words have been added: 2of5core.txt and 2+2+3cmn.txt. • The annotations of the 6of12.txt list have been reworked. • Minor corrections have been made to the "classic" lists. • The neologism file, containing words too recent or controversial to be listed in many of the source dictionaries, has been updated. • Slight changes were made to the list of 6of12.txt signature words after it was determined that a few of them should have been present as regular (non-signature) words in the main body of the list but were omitted due to compilation errors. • The files were organized into directories to make them more manageable given their increased number. • The 2of4brif.txt list is being "deprecated". I will continue to distribute it, but will not be changing or maintaining it. I consider the 3of6game.txt list to be a complete replacement. Some general observations With the exception of the neol2016 list, all the 12dicts lists were assembled in a similar fashion. Words were extracted from a set of source dictionaries and, in most cases, a list was assembled by selecting all words and phrases present in some number of the sources meeting certain criteria. For instance, the 2of12 list comprises lower-case and hyphenated words present in at least two of twelve source dictionaries. For some lists, rules are added establishing exceptions for certain words or classes of words - for instance, the 2of12 list contains the upper-case words I and O as exceptions to its general exclusion of upper-case words and names. Some lists contain annotations, which are special characters appended to certain words. For instance, the ":" character is used in some lists to identify abbreviations which are ordinarily used without a terminating period. This annotation allows these abbreviations to be distinguished from possibly similar regular words. Another annotation, used in the 3of6game and 3of6all lists, is the "$" character, indicating a word that was placed in the list even though fewer than three of the sources mention it. The "+" and "!'" annotations are used to identify signature words and neologisms, as described below. Note that is it possible for a word to have more than one annotation, though this is uncommon. For instance, in the 6of12 list, the word boldfaced~= has both a "~" and a "=" annotation, signifying that the word was an arbitrary choice between two equally attested forms (boldfaced and bold-faced), and that it was not given a separate definition in a majority of the sources listing it. A number of the lists contain signature words. These are words (or phrases) which do not meet the formal criteria for inclusion in a list, but which I have chosen to add anyway, as words which "ought to be" present. Whether a list contains signature words depends on the specific list. Usually, but not always, a signature word is present in some of the sources used for a list, but not enough of them to qualify for inclusion on that basis. Some lists may "inherit" signature words from other lists from which they were assembled. For instance, the 6phrase list includes the signature words from the 3of6all list. In most cases, signature words are marked with the "+" annotation. The neol2016 list contains neologisms, words which are not listed in some or all of the source dictionaries for 12dicts, generally for one of two reasons. First, many of the words are recent coinages which were not yet fully recognized by mainstream lexicographers when the 12dicts sources were published. Examples of such words are selfie, Obamacare, emoji and snarky. Other so-called neologisms are well-established, often well-known, words which are considered scandalous, such as sexual slang and ethnic slurs, and which are often deliberately omitted from dictionaries. (I will not give any examples of this sort of word here, but you will find some in the neol2016 list.) Note that the neologism list has been accumulating for about fifteen years now, and some of its words have become almost old-fashioned, such as spam and dotcom. The neologism list is provided so that some or all of its words can be added to the other lists where the intended usage makes that appropriate. However, I have added the single-word neologisms to the 2of12inf and 3of6game, as these lists are the most likely to be used in coding word games, where it is desirable to recognize the very latest hot vocabulary. In these lists, neologisms are annotated with the "!" character. One other observation worth making is about diacritics. Some dictionaries will tell you that there are English words correctly spelled café, naïve, façade and piñata, and I do not wish to disagree with these authorities. But as a practical matter, Americans do not like to use diacritics. Furthermore they use keyboards which do not contain accented letters, and are often unfamiliar with the often clumsy techniques that their software provides to use such characters. For this reason, 12dicts drops all the accents from its English vocabulary. This is particularly valuable for coding word games, where expecting players to accent the e in cafe is not going to make them happy. (I cannot help pointing out that Scrabble® contains no É tiles.) I apologize to those who consider it a matter of some emotional importance that resume and résumé should be differently spelled. The organization of 12dicts The 12dicts lists are organized into four directories, grouping lists with similar characteristics together. The remainder of this document follows this organization as well. For each directory, a section of the documentation describes in detail the lists it contains. Most users of 12dicts end up using only a single list. If it is clear which directory will contain the list you need, you can go directly to the appropriate documentation. The four directories are: • American. The lists in this directory contain primarily American English words. • International. The lists in this directory contain words from both American English and British English. • Lemmatized. The lists in this directory combine other lists, and are formatted in a way that clarifies word relationships. • Special. The lists in this directory are special-purpose lists that do not fit into the other directories. Picking a list to use If you are not certain which directory might contain the kind of list you are looking for, here is a breakdown of the 12dicts lists by size and purpose which may be helpful. If it does not help you find what you are looking for, you might want to check out this table, which summarizes the characteristics of all the 12dicts files, put together by Kevin Atkinson. Also, I suggest reading the introduction to each directory presented in the previous paragraph, each of which contains a table summarizing exactly what you can expect from each list in that directory. • Lists for use in word games: 2of12inf (American), 3of6game (International). • A list ordered by word frequency: 2+2+3frq (Lemmatized). • Small lists of common words: 2of5core (Special, very small), 3esl (American), 2+2+3cmn (Lemmatized). • Medium-sized lists: 6of12 (American, smaller, includes phrases), 2of12 (American, larger, no phrases). • Large lists: 3of6all (International, includes phrases), 5d+2a (International, no phrases, many obscure words), 2+2+3lem (Lemmatized, very large). • A list of phrases: 6phrase (Special). The classic (American) 12dicts lists The 12dicts project began as the n-dicts projects, n being a variable whose value finally stabilized as 12. The purpose of the project was to create a list of words approximating the common core of the vocabulary of American English. The methodology of the project was to record and correlate the words listed in a number of small dictionaries. The number of dictionaries so recorded ended up as 12, comprising 8 ESL (English as a Second Language) dictionaries and 4 "desk dictionaries". The dictionaries chosen varied widely by publisher, by style, by completeness and by depth. All of them were dictionaries of American English (three from British publishers). The smallest of them contained about 20,000 entries, and the largest 46,000. (All totaled, there are about 75,000 entries, many of which appeared in only a single dictionary.) All but two of the sources were published between 1992 and 1999, when 12dicts was first released. The following table summarizes the contents of each of the classic lists, located in the American directory, ordered by size in words: ┌─────────────────┬──────┬──────┬──────┬────────┐ │ │ 3esl │6of12 │2of12 │2of12inf│ ├─────────────────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼────────┤ │Size (Words) │22,000│32,000│41,000│82,000 │ ├─────────────────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼────────┤ │Number of Sources│3 │12 │12 │12 │ ├─────────────────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼────────┤ │American English │Y │Y │Y │Y │ ├─────────────────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼────────┤ │British English │– │– │– │– │ ├─────────────────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼────────┤ │Ordinary words │Y │Y │Y │Y │ ├─────────────────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼────────┤ │Inflections │– │– │– │Y │ ├─────────────────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼────────┤ │Hyphenations │Y │Y │Y │– │ ├─────────────────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼────────┤ │Phrases │Y │Y │– │– │ ├─────────────────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼────────┤ │Names │Y │Y │– │– │ ├─────────────────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼────────┤ │Abbreviations │Y │Y │– │– │ ├─────────────────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼────────┤ │Acronyms │Y │Y │– │– │ ├─────────────────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼────────┤ │Prefixes/Suffixes│– │– │– │– │ ├─────────────────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼────────┤ │Signature words │– │Y │Y │* │ ├─────────────────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼────────┤ │Neologisms │– │– │– │Y │ ├─────────────────┼──────┼──────┼──────┼────────┤ │Annotations │Y │Y │Y │Y │ └─────────────────┴──────┴──────┴──────┴────────┘ A * in the "Signature Words" row means that signature words associated with some other list may be present, but there are no signature words associated specifically with that list. The 6of12 and 2of12 lists I initially tried two different ways of winnowing the 12dicts data to produce lists of common words. Both produced interesting results. One list, the 6of12 list, contained all words and phrases listed in 6 of the 12 dictionaries. One way of describing this list is that it contains those words and phrases which a (seeming) majority of lexicographers believe are relevant to people learning English, and/or to everyday usage. This list contained about 32,000 words and phrases. The other list, the 2of12 list, was more inclusive in that it included words listed in as few as two of the source dictionaries, but less inclusive in that it excluded items of various sorts, including multi-word phrases, proper names and abbreviations. This list contained about 41,000 words. It was likely more suitable for use in areas like spell checking or word games than the 6of12 list. (Honesty compels me to admit that neither of these lists is, by itself, a good choice for spell checking, due to the absence of inflections, proper names, Roman numerals, etc.) A third list, 2of12inf.txt, developed later, was of a rather different character, and is discussed in a later section. A more precise description of the criteria by which the above lists were composed is as follows: 6of12 list word selection • The 6of12 list contains all non-excluded words and phrases which appear in 6 or more of the source dictionaries. • Prefixes and suffixes are excluded. Abbreviations are included; however, if they are entirely lower-case and alphabetic, they are terminated with a colon (":") so they can be easily distinguished from regular words. • Inflections of included words are not themselves included unless they are separately defined or irregular. • It sometimes occurs that a word is listed in several forms (e.g., with and without hyphenation) in 6 or more dictionaries, even though no single form is so listed. In this case, if one spelling is clearly more accepted, this spelling and this spelling only is listed. If all spellings seem equally accepted, one spelling has been selected arbitrarily for inclusion. • The 6of12 list contains a significant number of signature words, as discussed below. All of these words are listed in at least one of the source dictionaries. • In addition to the ":" suffix discussed above, other annotations are used to mark words with certain characteristics, as discussed below. 2of12 list word selection • The 2of12 list contains all non-excluded words which appear in at least 2 of the source dictionaries. • This list excludes capitalized words, multi-word phrases, and abbreviations, as well as prefixes and suffixes. It does not exclude hyphenated words or contractions. If a word occurs in both a hyphenated and an unhyphenated form, the unhyphenated form is listed, even if the hyphenated form is generally preferred. • The list excludes spellings which are considered (by a majority of the dictionaries listing it) to be non-American usage. It also excludes secondary spellings which are mentioned by fewer than four of the source dictionaries. • Inflections of included words are not themselves included unless they are separately defined, or irregular. • Several of the source dictionaries include listings for obscure currencies, such as ringgit, khoum and ngwee. I was unable to regard such words as part of the English "core vocabulary", and so I required citation in over a third of the dictionaries for inclusion of such monetary units. A side-effect was the elimination of the word lepton, which, in addition to its use in particle physics, is also .01 Greek drachmas. • This list also includes a small number of signature words, as discussed below. Signature words As indicated, both lists have been augmented with words (and, in the case of the 6of12 list, phrases) which fail to meet the formal requirements for inclusion. In the case of the 6of12 list, 1024 words were added (about 3 % of the total). These are all words which, in the judgment of the compiler, are as familiar as many of the words which did meet the criteria for inclusion. Examples of some of the sorts of words which were added are: • Words of the same category as other included words. An example is the astrological sign Cancer, which alone of all the astrological signs fails to appear in 6 or more of the dictionaries. Similarly added was the omitted holiday Christmas Eve. • Vulgarities, sexual terms and insults. Some such words were already included, but most of the source dictionaries were quite squeamish about them. These words are very widely known indeed; I hold that any list of "common" words which does not include the infamous f-word is simply discredited thereby. Some may feel that it would have been better to leave some or all of these terms unmentioned. Nevertheless, the expression of blasphemy, unwarranted contempt and perverse lust, whether in words or in deeds, is a very human trait. Suppressing the evidence of these aspects of the human condition in our language makes no more sense than excluding leprosy, gangrene and dementia, no matter how unpleasant they may be to contemplate. • Conventional conversational phrases so common as to be practically invisible to native speakers. Examples are thank you, good night, uh-huh, of course and gesundheit. • Sports terminology, especially for football and baseball. (If I, who am practically sports-blind, noticed this deficiency, it must be of major proportions indeed.) Note that the signature words in the 6of12 list can be identified via the annotation "+", and eliminated if desired. A much smaller set of words (49) was added to the 2of12 list. These were of two sorts: • Signature words from the 6of12 list which were not already present in the 2of12 list, and which are not excluded due to being abbreviations, phrases, etc. • Inflections of irregular verbs not explicitly mentioned in 2 source dictionaries, such as outfought and reheard. These words are not marked with suffix characters. Annotations Some of the 6of12 list entries are annotated with a suffix character, giving additional information about the associated word. The annotations can be easily removed with an editor or a script if they are unwanted. These annotations are: : The word is an otherwise unmarked abbreviation. This suffix always occurs before any other suffix. & The word is primarily a non-American usage. # The word is generally held to be a variant or less preferred form of another word. = Roughly, this indicates a "second class" word, as described below. < This form of a word is held to be the primary form by fewer dictionaries than some other form of the word. ^ This form of the word was selected as the most commonly listed of a set of variant spellings. ~ This form of a word is one of a set of variant spellings, none of which was clearly preferred. + The word is a signature word. The reasons a word might be marked with the = annotation are: • The word is an inflection which was defined in the same entry as the base word. • The word is a derived word (usually ending with -ly, -ness or -er/or) which was not defined in a separate entry. • The word appeared in a list of undefined words with a common prefix, such as un- or re-. Note that, in the determination of the "<", "^", and "^" suffixes, only certain very close spelling variations are considered, namely single word vs. hyphenated word vs. multi-word, differences in capitalization, and presence or absence of a terminating period for abbreviations. The words tenderhearted and tender-hearted are close variants by this definition, but judgment and judgement are not. The words in the 2of12 list are not annotated. The 2of12inf list The 2of12inf list is of a rather different character from the two original "classic" lists. Conceptually, it is simple. It consists of all the unhyphenated words in the 2of12 list, plus their inflections, amounting to about 82,000 words. This list may be more useful than the other lists for applications like word games. It was created to help Kevin Atkinson in his Aspell and SCOWL projects (for which, follow these links). Unlike the 6of12 and 2of12 lists, this list was not based exclusively on the contents of my 12 source dictionaries, and for this reason it has, I feel, less authority than the other classic 12dicts lists. It also probably has a significantly higher error rate than the other lists, for reasons explained below. The criteria defining the 2of12inf list are as follows: • The 2of12inf list contains all non-excluded words which appear in at least 2 of the source dictionaries. • This list excludes capitalized words, multi-word phrases, abbreviations, contractions, hyphenated words and single-letter words, as well as prefixes and suffixes. • The list does not exclude secondary spellings, non-American usages or monetary units. • The list includes inflections of all included words. Any inflection mentioned or clearly implied by any of the source dictionaries is included (i.e., two citations are not required). Additionally, some inflections have been added from other sources. • Plurals of "uncountable" nouns were included, annotated with the "%" suffix character. See below for an extended discussion of the inclusion of these words. • Qualifying signature words from the other lists, plus their inflections, were added. No other signature words were added. • Qualifying neologisms from the neol2016 list, including their inflections, were added. The neologisms are indicated by a '!' prefix. Though the 2of12inf list still consists mostly of very common words, criteria 3 through 5 above cause the 2of12inf list to contain a greater proportion of unfamiliar and unusual words than the other classic 12dicts lists. The 2of12inf list was not derived directly from the 12 source dictionaries. The starting point was a subset of Kevin Atkinson's AGID list, a list of words, parts of speech and inflections derived from public-domain sources, notably Moby Words and WordNet. (See the file agid.txt in the 12dicts archive, which is a copy of the AGID "readme", for more information on the antecedents of AGID.) 2of12inf was created by a process of editing the AGID subset to remove spurious entries and those which reflected a more esoteric English vocabulary than the other 12dicts lists, and to add inflections which AGID failed to identify. This process required significantly less effort than would have been needed to derive the list directly from the source dictionaries. Unfortunately, a side effect of the process was that the result is probably somewhat less reliable than the other 12dicts lists. In particular, Moby Words is notoriously unreliable, and I find it unlikely that I have successfully identified all the spurious inflections its use has introduced. It would be nice to release another edition of 2of12inf which is not derived from AGID, and therefore not "infected" by Moby Words, but I haven't done so in 15 years, and so it probably won't happen. After the first version of the 2of12inf list was released, I replaced one of the source dictionaries, officially an international dictionary but in actuality rather British in its orientation, with a more American dictionary by the same publisher. It was not practical (nor necessarily desirable) for me to go through the list removing inflections endorsed only by the superseded dictionary. For this reason, the 2of12inf list has a slightly more international character than the other 12dicts lists. It is not altogether clear that this is a bad thing. Selection of inflections Ideally, the 2of12inf list would contain only inflections listed in one of the 12dicts source dictionaries. This proved not to be practical. The reason for this has to do with the nature of these sources, which are mostly ESL dictionaries. An ESL dictionary might well list the word esophagus, but, because an English learner is unlikely to need to talk about this organ in the plural, it will probably not bother to list the plural form esophagi. For words of this sort, I therefore needed to obtain their inflections from other sources. Obviously, the decisions on when to include additional inflections were judgment calls, as were the choices of which inflections to add. Adjectival inflections (comparatives and superlatives) proved to be an especially annoying problem. Only 2 of my 12 source dictionaries provided remotely reliable information of this sort. In fact, such information is sparse and inconsistent in most dictionaries of any size. I relied on a small set of additional dictionaries for this information, which was mostly disjoint from the sources for plurals and verb forms. Several of these sources were Scrabble®-related, and therefore inclined to include forms of little plausibility such as iller/illest or fertiler/fertilest. Accordingly, I ended up rejecting some of the documented inflections on grounds of implausibility. I have no doubt that, in the process, I made a number of errors of both inclusion and exclusion and, in any case, many of the forms listed have no connection with any of the 12dicts source dictionaries. One additional problem in the creation of the 2of12inf list was that of "uncountable" nouns and their plurals. Some English dictionaries, especially ESL dictionaries, as well as other linguistic sources attest to the existence of nouns which cannot be counted or used in the plural. Examples of such nouns include mud, rayon, oregano, chess, fairness, wisdom, aluminum, training, materialism and chickenpox. This is an entirely commonsense notion, but a difficulty is the fact that the boundary between the countable and the uncountable is extremely vague and ill-defined. For example, the word coffee is ordinarily uncountable, but not when ordering in a restaurant, as is the word symmetry, except in physics or math. In general, it is possible to contrive a context where use of the plural of any noun whatsoever is reasonable. An alternate position, therefore, is that in fact no nouns are uncountable, and that any noun which is not already plural possesses a plural. This position is especially useful in the context of word games, where words such as zeals and anthraxes may produce large scores. For this reason, the official Scrabble dictionaries list words such as thens, onces and mankinds, which most people find rather implausible. The fact that the 2of12inf list might well be useful in gaming contexts, together with the fact that the boundary between countable and uncountable nouns is so ill-defined, served as a powerful argument for inclusion of all plural forms, whether commonly used or not, while its derivation from ESL sources argued for including only the plurals of countable nouns, however distinguished. As I prepared the list for release, I was unable to resolve this dilemma, and adopted a compromise. The 2of12inf list includes all plurals, but with the plurals of uncountable nouns marked, making it easy to remove them if they are not wanted. That left the issue of how to establish countability. Six of my source dictionaries included information on countability, which was adequate to decide the status of most of the included nouns. As for the rest, as usual, I used my best judgment. I will confess to occasionally overriding the source dictionaries when I believed they were clearly incorrect. (For instance, I chose not to mark the word hatreds as an uncountable plural, in defiance of the opinion of all my sources, on the grounds that it has been used in too many news stories from Bosnia to be considered unusual.) It is interesting to note that most of the plurals I added from auxiliary sources were of words considered uncountable. I also note that at some point after the release of the 2of12inf list, I decided that it would have been better to have left the Scrabble plurals out, and, while I was not comfortable with removing them, no list I've created since then which lists inflections includes them. The difficulties listed above, and the fact that I was forced to exercise personal judgment frequently in creating it, emphasizes a fundamental difference between this list and the other classic 12dicts lists. I have tried to make the 6of12 and 2of12 lists reflect only the source dictionaries, and to keep my own judgments and opinions out of the picture (except for my addition of signature words). This has proved impossible to achieve for the 2of12inf list, which accordingly represents a less authoritative and more arbitrary collection. Additionally, the 2of12inf list has undergone less proofreading and validation than the other lists, and I suspect the error rate is somewhat higher than the idealistic goal of 0.02% I adopted for this project. Nevertheless, I hope it may prove to be of some use and interest. I wish to offer my special thanks to Kevin Atkinson, for supplying me with the AGID list, and for encouraging me to add the inflections. Of course, any errors that remain in the 2of12inf list are my own responsibility, and should not be blamed on Kevin, AGID, or even on Moby. The 3esl list The 3esl list represents another attempt to produce an English "core vocabulary" list. It is about 2/3 of the size of the 6of12 list, which it resembles in terms of the sorts of words included. The 3esl list is a far more subjective list than any of the classic 12dicts lists. It was compiled from 3 small ESL dictionaries, using the same criteria for eligibility as the 6of12 list. I started with a list composed of all words from the smallest of the 3 sources, plus all words contained in both of the others. This list was then edited in the following ways: 1. I removed alternate spellings for included words, such as grey and off-stage. I also removed very similar synonyms for the same concept, for instance, removing cable television as a duplicate of cable TV. 2. I added one form of each word which would have been included if the sources had agreed on spelling, such as shortchange and back seat. 3. I removed some words which were present in the smallest of the sources but seemed too esoteric, such as the symbols of chemical elements. I did this only for words which were not present in the other sources. 4. I added some words which were present in only one of the two larger sources, but which seemed appropriate to add. These words were frequently of the sort added to the 6of12 list as signature words, as well as some inflections that often function as words with meanings of their own, such as comforting and notes. All of these changes were quite subjective in nature, and quite numerous. Probably more than 10 % of the candidate words were added or removed in this way. For this reason, it is pointless to speak of signature words for this list; the composition of the list is too arbitrary for the term to make any sense. (I will note that the list is still not entirely arbitrary, as I added only words found in some form in one of the sources, and removed no words present in two of the sources other than duplicates. Thus, words like front page were not added, no matter how familiar, and words such as lugubrious were not removed, despite clearly not being part of anyone's "core vocabulary".) Like the 6of12 list, the 3esl list marks lower-case abbreviations with a ":" suffix, to prevent them from being mistaken for regular English words. One final note on this list. The 3esl list contains about 1500 words not present in the 6of12 list. Because these two lists have the same rules for the kinds of words included, one could easily combine the two to produce a slightly larger list including a number of words whose omission from 6of12 is rather surprising. Be warned that in a few cases, the spelling chosen for words with multiple spellings is different in the two lists, and I would recommend that the duplicates be removed. (I'll be happy to provide a list of the duplicates if anyone wants one.) The international 12dicts lists Four 12dicts lists contain a more cosmopolitan vocabulary than the classic lists. Two of these lists, 2of4brif and 5d+2a (previously called 5desk), were released over ten years ago. The 2of4brif list was derived from four British dictionaries, and has now been deprecated, as I believe the 3of6game list to be a superior implementation of the same concept, compiled from more recent sources. The 5d+2a list was originally compiled from a variety of sources, but was extensively revised for this release by addition of several fairly recently published sources. For release 6, two new international lists were added to 12dicts: 3of6game and 3of6all. These were based on 6 "advanced learner's" ESL dictionaries, released by both American and British publishers, most of which covered both strains of English. The 3of6game list is intended primarily for use in word games, and can be compared to 2of12inf in its general approach. The 3of6all list includes more forms of words (hyphenated, capitalized, multi-word phrases, etc.), and can be compared to 6of12 in its general approach. Two other more unusual lists were derived from these sources: 6phrase and 2of5core. 6phrase is a collection of all the multi-word phrases from any of the six dictionaries. Five of the six international sources flag some words as being the most important words for an English beginner to master. The 2of5core list collects those words that are flagged in at least two of these dictionaries. Both of these lists are discussed in a little more detail in the "Specialized Lists" section of this document. The following table summarizes the contents of each of the lists in the International directory, ordered by size in words: ┌─────────────────┬────────┬────────┬────────────┬───────┐ │ │2of4brif│3of6game│ 5d+2a │3of6all│ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────────┼───────┤ │Size (Words) │60,000 │65,000 │68,000 │83,000 │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────────┼───────┤ │Number of Sources│4 │6 │7 (+5 minor)│6 │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────────┼───────┤ │American English │Some │Y │Y │Y │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────────┼───────┤ │British English │Y │Y │Y │Y │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────────┼───────┤ │Ordinary words │Y │Y │Y │Y │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────────┼───────┤ │Inflections │Y │Y │– │Y │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────────┼───────┤ │Hyphenations │– │– │– │Y │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────────┼───────┤ │Phrases │– │– │– │Y │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────────┼───────┤ │Names │– │– │Y │Y │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────────┼───────┤ │Abbreviations │– │– │– │Y │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────────┼───────┤ │Acronyms │– │– │Y │Y │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────────┼───────┤ │Prefixes/Suffixes│– │– │– │Y │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────────┼───────┤ │Signature words │– │Y │– │Y │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────────┼───────┤ │Neologisms │– │Y │– │– │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────────┼───────┤ │Annotations │– │Y │– │Y │ └─────────────────┴────────┴────────┴────────────┴───────┘ The 2of4brif list All of the classic 12dicts lists are unabashedly oriented towards American English. After receiving a few expressions of interest in a British English list, I put together the 2of4brif list. This list was compiled from 4 large "international" ESL dictionaries, published by British publishers. To this American, they are more British than they are international; quite possibly, they seem more American than international to British readers. It is interesting to note that, although there were only a third as many sources for this list as for the 12dicts lists, these dictionaries resembled each other far more closely than their American counterparts, which could mean that the 2of4brif list is as good an approximation of a "core" British English vocabulary as the 6of12 list is for American English. (Or, alternately, it may simply mean that my choice of sources was too narrow.) This criteria for inclusion in this list were basically those of the 2of12inf list. In particular, inflections are included for all words, but hyphenated words, contractions, phrases, proper names and abbreviations are all excluded. One important difference between the two is the way in which inflections were determined for inclusion. The 2of12inf list includes some inflections found in one (or even none) of its sources. Further, as discussed in detail above, it includes plurals for words which are not normally considered to have plurals. The 2of4brif list differs in both of these regards. It includes only inflections endorsed by two or more of the sources, specifically excluding any plural forms for nouns listed as uncountable. The 2of4brif list includes no signature words as such. I made a small number of adjustments for consistency, such as making sure that -ise and -ize spellings were equally represented, and adding plurals for ordinal numbers. (Why fourteenth would be defined as a fraction, but not seventeenth, I must simply regard as a mystery.) These edits were so few, and so clearly harmless, that I have not marked them. Prospective users of the 2of4brif list should realize that it was compiled by an American. If my sources contained any glaring errors (and most dictionaries have a few), I might well not have noticed, and perpetuated them in the list. The fact that two citations were required is some protection against such an event, but no guarantee. As the 2of4brif list is very similar in makeup to the 2of12inf list, a user who wants a larger, more international list than either could reasonably merge the two. If you do this, you should remove the unusual plurals (marked with a "%") from the 2of12inf list in the process, for consistency. Note that I have deprecated the 2of4brif list. I believe that any applications of this list would be better off using the 3of6game list in its place. The 3of6 lists The lists 3of6game and 3of6all are new with version 6 of 12dicts. Both were derived from a set of six advanced learner's ESL dictionaries. The dictionaries can be broken down as follows: • One strongly American-oriented dictionary. • Two somewhat British-oriented dictionaries. • Three international dictionaries, one from an American publisher, two from a British publisher. This provided a good balance between British and American usage. My goal was to produce lists that contained blancmange and swede as well as applesauce and boysenberry. Note that some of the British dictionaries include words from Australian, Indian, African and Caribbean English, and a fraction of this vocabulary made it into the 3of6 lists. In previous versions of 12dicts, I asked users to tell me what they were doing with the lists. The most common answer was that they were used to supply the vocabulary for a word game. The 3of6game list was designed to fulfill this purpose. It contains only the sort of words likely to be used in a word game (no hyphenated words, proper names, abbreviations, contractions or phrases), but does contain inflections. In general, words must appear in three of the sources to be included. The rules, however, do provide for a number of (annotated) exceptions, including uncommon inflections and words whose most common form is either hyphenated or phrasal. Details are below. The 3of6all list is a larger list, basically containing any kind of word you can imagine, if found in three of the sources. As with 3+3game, some additional words were added as exceptions, but there are not as many of them, as the goal of this list is to be as faithful as reasonable to the sources. Both the 3of6game and 3of6all lists contain signature words/phrases. The 3of6game list also contains neologisms, as game players are likely to want to play recently coined or popularized words. The 3of6game list The 3of6game list contains words which are listed in 3 of the 6 advanced learners dictionaries described above. Only words suitable for play in most word games are included, excluding hyphenated words, multi-word phrases, capitalized words, abbreviations and contractions. There are no restrictions on length - in particular, it contains four one-letter words: a, x (a verb meaning to cross out), I and O, the last two of which are included despite their capitalization (which is an English spelling phenomenon entirely disconnected from logic). In certain cases, words are present in this list despite being listed in fewer than three sources. This serves the purpose of offering game players more words in situations where lexicographers differ about what word forms are correct. Some exceptional situations are: • A word is one of a set of close variants, none of which is present in three of the sources. These words are marked with a "^" suffix. An example is the word aqualung, which is sometimes capitalized or hyphenated. • The word is a British spelling of an American word listed in three sources, or an American spelling of a British word from three sources. These words are marked with a "&" suffix. Examples include prolog, an American form of the British prologue, and hyaena, a British spelling of the American hyena. • A word is a plural of a word which only two of the sources describe as countable, such as boyhoods. Similarly, adjectival inflections are added if as few as two of the sources attest to it, as with frillier and frilliest. • A word is an unusual inflection of a word where at least three sources agree that some inflection is called for, such as the less common plural planetaria of planetarium. • A word is an inflection for a word used as an unusual part of speech, whose meaning is closely related to a more common meaning. Examples are the verb forms autopsied and autopsying, whose meanings are closely related to the common meaning of the noun autopsy. • A word is a unhyphenated form of a word normally hyphenated or written phrasally such as ballgame, which is more commonly written ball game. Words not present in three of the source dictionaries are marked with the "$" suffix character if the "^" and "&" annotations do not apply. The 3of6game list includes both signature words and neologisms, marked with a "+" or "!" respectively. There are 520 signature words for this list, representing words that I feel "ought to be" included. Each signature word is present in at least one of the source dictionaries. Virtually all of these words are American English, as I am not qualified to tell whether a interesting Britishism like tosspot is used often enough to justify its addition as a signature word. Note that the presence of annotations allows a user to remove these extra words if she finds their addition unjustified. The 3of6game list could be combined with the 2of12inf list (minus the uncountable plurals) and/or 2of4brif if a larger list is required. Note that because 2of2inf is very strongly American, such a combination will be less balanced between American and British English than 3of6game itself. The 3of6all list The 3of6all list contains words which are listed in three of the six advanced learner's dictionaries. In contrast to the 3of6game list, no words are excluded, not even abbreviations, prefixes or suffixes. Most words have their inflections included. An exception is made for phrasal verbs and other verb phrases, whose inflections are completely predictable from the initial word of the phrase. The 3of6all list contains many phrasal verbs, such as let down, take after, sound off and make out, whose meanings are often quite hard for inexperienced students of English to guess. Phrasal verbs are marked by the ";" suffix character. Only four of the six source dictionaries provide phrasal verb information in an easy-to-collect way. For this reason, I put a phrasal verb into the 3of6all list even if I found it in only two of the sources. The 3of6all list contains some other words present in fewer than three of the dictionaries, though not as many as 3of6game. All such words are marked. The cases where this occurs are as follows: • As described for the 3of6game list, a word is one of a set of close variants, none of which is present in three of the sources. These words are marked with a "^" suffix. For this list, in addition to differences in hyphenation or single/multi-word format, variants only in capitalization or (for abbreviations) the presence or absence of a period are considered close. • As described for the 3of6game list, a word is a British spelling of an American word listed in three sources, or an American spelling of a British word from three sources. These words are marked with a "&" suffix. • A few other words present in fewer than three of the dictionaries are added. Usually, this occurs when a word is found by three sources to have the same part of speech, but the sources fail to agree on the spelling of the inflection(s). An example is the word Grammy, whose plural is claimed by two sources to be Grammies, and by two others to be Grammys. These words are annotated with the "$" suffix. There is one other situation where an annotation suffix is used. This occurs when a word is shown by a majority of the sources as being used only in a few specific phrases, even though other dictionaries may give it a regular definition. An example is the word bated, which is shown by most of the sources as used only in the phrase with bated breath. In this case, the word is flagged with a ">" suffix. A search on a word so flagged will reveal the key phrase(s) elsewhere in the list. Recall that, sometimes, a word may have more than one suffix. An abbreviation shown with the ":" suffix (indicating the absence of a final period) may be followed by another suffix, and the combination ">^" appears upon occasion. The 3of6all list contains signature phrases, but no neologisms. The signature phrases are marked with the "+" suffix. The 629 3of6all signatures are all basic conversational idioms and common connective phrases, like I told you so, in front of and on the other hand. Though these phrases often show up in the sources in lists of idioms, they generally do not appear as separate headwords, which kept me from easily recording their presence. I believe, however, that all of these phrases are extremely common, and deserve to be included in this list. The signature phrases are all marked with the "+" suffix. The 5d+2a list I created the 5d+2a list (originally called 5desk) in an attempt to do a better /usr/dict/words (the failings of which were a large part of my motivation for doing 12dicts in the first place). The sorts of words admitted are the same sorts that /usr/dict/words traditionally contains. Though somewhat larger in size than many versions of /usr/dict/words, this is still a short word list, striving for inclusion of words one is likely to encounter rather than the complete jargon of every possible scientific, artistic or occult endeavor. The original 5desk list was assembled primarily from five "desk dictionaries". It was augmented by words from five minor sources, including a "vocabulary builder" and a collection of proper names. It excluded prefixes, suffixes, phrases, hyphenated words, contractions and most abbreviations and acronyms. There was no requirement for multiple listings; all qualifying words from each of the sources were included. Inflections of included words were not included themselves except when irregular, or separately defined. Variant and non-American spellings were not excluded, and no signature words were added. Words commonly considered to be abbreviations/acronyms were included if they contained at least one upper case character, and were defined with an explicit part of speech. This excluded items like Mr and Feb, which are abbreviations in the classic sense, but allowed words like DNA and ATM, which are used far more frequently than that which they abbreviate. While there is a trend in modern dictionaries to list such words as nouns (or occasionally verbs, adverbs, etc.), it is a trend in progress, and rather inconsistently applied. For this reason, the set of such words in the 5desk list is somewhat incoherent, including SPCA but not PETA, AIDS but not SAD, KGB but not CIA, and PDQ but not ASAP. When version 6 of 12dicts was released, the 5desk list was augmented by adding qualifying words from two advanced learner's ESL dictionaries, and as a result renamed to 5d+2a.txt. Both of the additional dictionaries had a strongly international vocabulary, causing the new list to have a less American and more cosmopolitan character. This increased the size of the list by about 20% to about 68,000 words. One class of commonly-used words is regrettably absent from the 5desk list, because I was unable to find a satisfactory source for them. This is the class of commercial names such as Exxon, Tylenol, Pepsi and Chevy. This is probably forgivable, as this class of names is as ephemeral and transitory as teenage slang. The one-time household words Kool, Ovaltine, Philco and Ipana serve now only as answers to trivia questions, with modern wonders like Starbucks, Google, Ritalin and TiVo taking their place on the tongues of the trendy. The 5d+2a list contains no signature words. I did take the liberty of adding the personal names of around thirty well-known individuals, mostly statesmen and politicians. Though the original 5desk list contained many such names from all periods of human history, I have not found a useful source to bring the list into the twenty-first century. At the same time, I felt that distributing a list full of names that did not include Cheney and Obama was not reasonable. So I compromised by adding a few names whose historical significance was clear to me, until such time as a better source than my own memories of the last 15 years can be found. The 5d+2a list has clearly moved beyond any "core vocabulary" concept. It includes quite esoteric words (ogee, pleonastic), very uncommon spellings ( thiamine, yuppy), and obscure geographical and historical names (Paricutin, Nevelson). Like the traditional /usr/dict/words, it is frequently inconsistent and arbitrary, but I hope at the least I have avoided including spelling errors, and overlooking the stuff of everyday conversation. Perhaps it will be useful as a compromise between basic lists such as 3esl, and truly massive lists like Mendel Cooper's ENABLE. The lemmatized 12dicts lists Version 6 of 12dicts provides three lemmatized lists combining words from the 2of12inf, 3of6game and 2of4brif lists. The word "lemmatized" is a rare word, which you will find in none of these lists, but what it means is that these lists are formatted as a collection of word sets, called lemmas (or lemmata, if you're into irregular plurals), each set composed of a headword and some number (possibly zero) of closely related words. Two of these lists were introduced in version 5 of 12dicts, but they have undergone major revisions since then. The three lists are 2+2+3lem (originally 2+2lemma), 2+2+3frq (originally 2+2gfreq) and 2+2+3cmn. 2+2+3lem simply arranges the words of the three source lists into lemmas and lists them alphabetically by headword. 2+2+3frq arranges the same lemmas by approximate order of their frequency of usage, computed with the help of a frequency list obtained from Brigham Young University (BYU), omitting those words and lemmas whose usage is so small that they fail to show up in the BYU material. 2+2+3cmn extracts a subset of the lemmas of 2+2+3lem, namely those lemmas with a certain minimum level of usage (approximately the level of the word butterscotch), and lists them alphabetically by headword. This is yet another attempt in 12dicts to generate a core English vocabulary. The advantage of a lemmatized presentation of words is that it puts related words together, even when spellings differ greatly, as for be, are, is and were . A moderate disadvantage is that the same word can appear in more than one lemma, such as putting, which is present in the lemmas headed by both put and putt. Overall, I find the lemmatized format to be clearer and more useful than a simple alphabetized list, and I rather wish I had released the other lists which include inflections in that format. The following table summarizes the contents of each of the lists in the Lemmatized directory, ordered by size in words: ┌─────────────────┬────────┬────────┬────────┐ │ │2+2+3cmn│2+2+3frq│2+2+3lem│ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │Size (Words) │25,000 │34,000 │84,000 │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │Number of Sources│21 │21 │21 │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │American English │Y │Y │Y │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │British English │Some │Some │Y │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │Ordinary words │Y │Y │Y │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │Inflections │Some │Some │Y │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │Hyphenations │Some │Some │Y │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │Phrases │– │– │– │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │Names │Some │Some │– │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │Abbreviations │Some │Some │– │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │Acronyms │Some │Some │– │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │Prefixes/Suffixes│– │– │– │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │Signature words │Y │* │* │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │Neologisms │A few │A few │Y │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼────────┤ │Annotations │Y │Y │Y │ └─────────────────┴────────┴────────┴────────┘ A * in the "Signature Words" row means that signature words associated with some other list may be present, but there are no signature words associated specifically with that list. The 2+2+3lem list The list 2+2+3lem.txt contains the words in the 2of12inf, 2of4brif and 3of3game lists. Also, the new words from the neol2016.txt list have been added, marked with a "!" if they would not have otherwise been included. (Marking the new words permits them to be removed if it is preferred for this list to be in synch with the other 12dicts lists.) Furthermore, some high-frequency hyphenated words from 2of12.txt and 3of6all have been added. These words were originally added to the lemmatized frequency list (see below), and I liked the results so much that I added them to this list as well. Finally, British forms of words in the 2of12inf list not already in the other lists have been added. Words marked with a % in the 2of12inf list ("Scrabble plurals") have however been omitted. In the previous version of 12dicts, the 2+2+3lem list was called 2+2lemma. The only significant changes were the addition of new words, and switching from "+" to "!" to mark neologisms in the list. The 2+2+3lem list is not formatted as a simple list of words. It is composed of entries of 1 or 2 lines each. The first line contains a headword, and the second line, which is indented if present, contains an alphabetized list of related words. A simple example: funny funnier, funnies, funniest, funnily, funniness The list of related words contains three sorts of entries. 1. Inflections. 2. Variant spellings. 3. Words formed with certain suffixes. In addition to true variant spellings such as grey for gray and thru for through, item 2 also includes words which, though pronounced differently, are clearly variants of the headword. Thus, hooray is considered a variant of hurrah (but mere synonyms like furze and gorse remain independent). Item 3 is based on a small list of suffixes, producing closely and consistently related words. These suffixes are -ful, -ish, -less, -like, -ly, -most and -ness. -ally is also allowed, if there is no -al word to apply the -ly suffix to. (For instance, basically is considered to be derived from basic, because there is no word basical.) When one of these suffixes is used in an unusual way, the resulting word is considered independent. For instance, likely is not considered to be derived from like, nor bashful from bash. There are some rather difficult questions here, such as how closely slavish is related to slave, or sluggish to slug. In general, I have chosen the course of least surprise by treating such pairs as independent. Here are some other notes on the determination of what words are related. Certain uses of the suffixes -ed and -s are treated as inflections, even though technically they are not. Thus, talented is treated as derived from talent, and optics from optic. Words ending with the suffix -ability/ibility are treated as relatives of the corresponding -able/ible word. Sometimes, the choice of which variant to treat as the headword is somewhat arbitrary. I have consistently chosen an American spelling over a British spelling here. This has some effect on the number of headwords. I treat cheque as a variant of check, whereas, to an observer with a British bias, they would no doubt be separate headwords. No distinction is made of different meanings of the same word, even when they are so different that dictionaries list them separately. wind the noun and wind the verb are considered as a single word, as are second the adjective, second the noun and second the verb. It may sometimes happen that two different words have the same inflection ( putting derives both from putt and put; holier relates to holey as well as holy ), or that an inflection is a headword in its own right (as with wound, the past tense of wind, or crooked, the past tense of crook). These situations are noted in the 2+2+3lem list as cross-references to the alternate headword. There are two specific situations which might not be obvious where inflections are treated as different words. These occur when a present tense form or a -ness word has a plural inflection, as with meaning and weakness. Such words are always made headwords, even when the relationship to the original root is very close. Here is an example showing how cross-references are indicated: base based, baseless, basely, baseness, baser, bases -> [basis], basest, basing Almost always, a given word has only one cross-reference - the biggest exception is the incredible tangle shown in the example below: slue -> [slough] slew -> [slay, slew, slough], slewed, slewing, slews -> [slew, slough], slued, slues -> [slough], sluing where 4 uncommon words mostly pronounced sloo have become thoroughly confused. The 2+2+3frq list In the previous version of 12dicts, there was a file called 2+2gfreq.txt. This file has been completely replaced by a new implementation of the same idea. Like the older list, the 2+2+3frq list presents the lemmas of 2+2+3lem in bands of lemmas with about the same frequency of use. However, there are the following major differences from what was done before: • In the previous version, word frequency information was obtained from data collected from the World Wide Web supplied by Google. This data was very voluminous, but was quite distorted by the Web's emphasis on computerese, pornography and marketing. I am now using a commercial word frequency database, supplied by Brigham Young University, based on its Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). This data is less voluminous than the Google data, but is far more balanced and seemingly trustworthy. It has some other advantages, discussed below. • High-frequency hyphenated words from 2of12inf and 3of6all have been added. I liked the effect of this so much that I added the same words to the 2+2+3lem list. • A certain number of high frequency abbreviations, contractions and capitalized words were added. Some of these words were not to be found in any other 12dicts list, for which reason I did not also add them to 2+2+3lem. • The list was shortened by omitting all lemmas which did not appear at all in the BYU data. • Individual lemmas were shortened by omitting very infrequent words and all regular inflections, except when they were used frequently as a part of speech different from the headword, such as disappointed as an adjective rather than a verb form. The lemmas of 2+2+3frq are grouped into bands by the combined number of occurrences in the BYU data of the words in the lemmas. Band 21 contains lemmas whose words together appear between 16 and 31 times in the BYU data. Each other band contains lemmas of twice the frequency of the following band, that is, each lemma in band 20 appears in the BYU data between 32 and 63 times, and so on. The first band contains the three lemmas most frequently used in the English language (according to BYU), namely the, be (plus its inflections) and to. As already noted, some words are found in multiple lemmas. One helpful aspect of the BYU data is that it separates frequency data for a word by parts of speech, and notes the base word for inflected words. This often allows the frequency counts for a word like building to be accumulated under the correct lemma (either build or building). In the event that the BYU data is unable to completely resolve the appropriate lemma for a word, its frequency count is divided equally among the various candidates. 2+2+3frq is divided into bands by lines like this: ----- 5 ----- The lemmas in each band are presented in alphabetical order, not by the frequency of the individual lemma. Note that because the BYU data was extracted from a corpus of American English, the 2+2+3frq file tilts in an American direction, though some British words like bloke, colour and lorry have made it through. A useful attribute of the BYU data is that it, unlike the Google data, includes hyphenated words, as well as some abbreviations, contractions and capitalized words. The two cases are rather different. The inclusion of hyphenated words is explicitly intended. However, the BYU documentation states that proper names have been excluded where possible, while admitting that, in many cases, the software processing the data was unable to be sure whether a word was a proper name or not, in which case the word was included. The effect is that there are many words generally considered to be proper names present, notably the names of months of the year and days of the week, plus those of religions, nationalities and ideologies. You will not find names like linda, picasso, vladivostok, microsoft or rumpelstiltskin in the data, but you will find november, buddhist, peruvian and marxist, to the extent that I wonder if BYU might have used a different definition of "proper name" than the one I was taught in school. As for abbreviations, the BYU documentation makes no mention of them, but there are some very familiar abbreviations in the data. There are not a lot of them, which makes me wonder whether their presence was intentional or a processing error. Either way, I have no reason to doubt their frequency counts. I decided that I wanted to add high-frequency hyphenated words, proper names and abbreviations to the frequency list, as I consider this data to be very interesting. When I did so, I discovered in band 17 the words atlantean and klingon. I really don't think that these words have anywhere close to the same frequency as armband and carpool, which are also present in band 17. This makes me suspect that, for words of this frequency or less, the BYU data is starting to become less reliable. For this reason, I decided to stop adding hyphenated words, capitalized words, contractions and abbreviations after band 17. In the case of hyphenated words, I added them to the 2+2+3frq list only if they were present in either 2of12.txt or 3of6all.txt. I also added these words to the 2+2+3lem list. In the case of abbreviations and capitalized words, there were not all that many of them, and some of them were not present in any other 12dicts list, such as Americanist, Thatcherism and, of course, Klingon. For this reason, when I added capitalized words, contractions and abbreviations to 2+2+3frq, I parenthesized them to indicate that their presence had nothing to do with any source but the BYU data. The same consideration led me to omit these words from the 2+2+3lem list. The 2+2+3frq list is considerably smaller than the previous 2+2gfreq list due to my decision to drop lemmas which were absent from the BYU data, especially since the BYU data was considerably less voluminous and so left out many more words than the Google data. In addition, I observed that many high-frequency lemmas contained unusual spellings and archaic forms that were not present in the BYU data, such as cocoanut, iodin and didst, and decided to drop non-headwords from the lemmas unless their frequency was at or above the level of band 17. A similar decision was made to drop regular inflections from the lemmas in the 2+2+3frq list unless they had high frequency with a different part of speech, for example, loving as an adjective or fighting as a noun. Finally, I chose to drop the word/lemma cross-references from the 2+2+3frq list, replacing them with a * indicating that a word was to be found under another headword (though it might have been suppressed if it was a regular inflection). As an example of how this works out in practice, here is the lemma for time from 2+2+3lem: time timed, timeless, timelessly, timelessness, times, timing -> [timing] and here is the condensed version from 2+2+3frq. time timed, timeless The words timelessly and timelessness are not used often enough (according to BYU) to mention in the frequency list, while the word times was not frequently used except as a form of time, and, while the word timing was frequently used as a noun, its counts were collected under the lemma timing rather than time. The 2+2+3cmn list The 2+2+3cmn list is a relatively simple transformation of the 2+2+3frq list, in yet another attempt to produce a "core English" word list. It is composed of the lemmas of the 2+2+3frq list from bands 1 through 17, sorted in alphabetical order by headword. Minor formatting differences are that the "!" is removed from neologisms, and the parentheses are removed from capitalized words, abbreviations and contractions. I have added 67 signature words to 2+2+3cmn, which are abbreviations, contractions and capitalized words (mostly contractions) which I know to be extremely high frequency, but which were not present in the BYU data, words such as can't, Mr. and DVD. These words are marked with a + to indicate their absence from the 2+2+3frq source data. Like 2+2+3frq, 2+2+3cmn tilts strongly in the direction of American English. Because all the words of 2+2+3cmn are of moderately high frequency (assuming the BYU data is to be trusted), it probably is a better claimant than either 2of5core or 3esl to truly representing a core English vocabulary, at least of the American variety. Specialized 12 dicts lists The following table summarizes the contents of each of the lists in the Special directory, ordered by size in words: ┌─────────────────┬────────┬────────┬───────┐ │ │neol2016│2of5core│6phrase│ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼───────┤ │Size (Words) │600 │4,700 │22,000 │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼───────┤ │Number of Sources│0 │5 │6 │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼───────┤ │American English │Y │Y │Y │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼───────┤ │British English │A little│Y │Y │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼───────┤ │Ordinary words │Y │Y │– │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼───────┤ │Inflections │Y │– │– │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼───────┤ │Hyphenations │Y │A few │– │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼───────┤ │Phrases │Y │A few │Y │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼───────┤ │Names │Y │A few │A few │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼───────┤ │Abbreviations │Y │A few │A few │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼───────┤ │Acronyms │Y │A few │– │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼───────┤ │Prefixes/Suffixes│– │– │– │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼───────┤ │Signature words │– │– │* │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼───────┤ │Neologisms │Y │– │– │ ├─────────────────┼────────┼────────┼───────┤ │Annotations │Y │N │Y │ └─────────────────┴────────┴────────┴───────┘ A * in the "Signature Words" row means that signature words associated with some other list may be present, but there are no signature words associated specifically with that list. The neol2016 list The neol2016 list is a very simple list of new or newly recognized words, as described above. It is comprised of three parts, separated by blank lines. The first part lists regular (non-hyphenated, non-capitalized) words together with their inflections and variants, laid out similarly to the 2+2+3lem list. It includes plurals for uncountable nouns, marked with a "%" suffix. These words (except for the uncountable plurals) have been pre-added to the 2of12inf and 3of6game lists, suffixed with "!", allowing them to be easily removed if desired. The second part of the file is a small set of words for which additional inflections have been added. This portion of the file is in the same format as the first list. These inflections have also been added to the 2of12inf and 3of6game lists. The third part of the file contains new words and phrases which are not regular words: hyphenated words, multi-word phrases, proper names, abbreviations and acronyms. These words have not been pre-added to any other list. In all cases, users are encouraged to add some or all of these words to any of the other lists, as they feel appropriate. The 2of5core list Five of the six advanced learner's ESL dictionaries from which the 3of6 lists were compiled mark a subset of their words as being important words which every student of English should master. These subsets vary widely from dictionary to dictionary. As one of the original goals of the 12dicts project was to compile a list representing the English core vocabulary, I thought it would be interesting to combine these lists. My original thought was to provide a list that was simply the union of the marked subsets for each source. However, one particular dictionary had at least twice as many words in its subset as any of the others, and in many cases the words seemed to me to be poorly chosen. (Do moor and cash flow seem like key English language concepts to you?) So I chose when assembling my list to require that all words be marked as important words by at least two of the sources. The result was the 2of5core list, which contains about 4,700 words. While most words selected in this way were the same in American and British English, some belonged to one variant or the other. In some cases, a word appeared in two forms, such as center and centre. When I observed that a word was present in two forms, I combined them into a single line, for example center/centre. No other changes were made to the list. Due to the way in which the list was constructed, it seems somewhat haphazard. You may want to check out the Oxford 3000™, a list of 3000 words available from Oxford University, which is a core vocabulary created by lexicographers, to my eye superior to the 2of5core list. The 6phrase list When I was compiling the 3of6all list, I noticed something interesting. There were an extraordinary number of phrases listed by only one of the sources. Many of these were extremely common phrases, which I would expect most experienced English speakers to understand. So, naturally, I decided to compile them all into a list. The 6phrase list contains all multi-word phrases from any of the six advanced learner's dictionaries which were used as sources for 3of6all, all 22,000 of them. The list does not include inflections, except in a few cases where a plural cannot easily be guessed from the words in a phrase. Usually, this happens for phrases of non-English origin, such as eau de cologne, whose plural is eaux de cologne. The list includes phrasal verbs, which are suffixed by the ";" character, as in the 3of6all list. The list is sorted in a different order than the lexicographical ordering used by the other lists, in order to group all phrases starting with the same word together. You will observe that the same phrase will often be repeated several times in the list, with slightly different spelling, capitalization and/or hyphenation. No attempt was made to edit the list to remove or reduce such "clutter". The 6phrase list includes the 3of6all signature phrases. These are not marked with a suffix. In contrast to most of the other lists, I am unable to think of any applications of the 6phrase list. But I find it rather interesting, which is why I'm bothering to include it. At the very least, it may serve as an illustration of the incredible richness of the English language, without even venturing into vocabulary too esoteric to be included in a learner's dictionary. How 12dicts came to be It may have occurred to some to wonder about how something like the 12dicts project came to be (though I assume that anyone who bothers to download this archive must already have some idea that such a project could be of interest). Many years ago, there was a post to the sci.crypt Usenet newsgroup, on the subject of creating PGP passphrases using randomly selected entries from a supplied list of very short words. (If this sounds interesting, follow this link for an expanded version of the post.) The word list, which was extracted from /usr/dict/words on some UNIX system, seemed to me ill-suited to its intended purpose. It included arcane acronyms (bstj, fmc), misspellings (diety, ouvre) and words of amazing obscurity (bhoy, kombu). I decided I could do better, and eventually did. This caused me to start downloading English word lists, of which there were many, from the Internet. I was not impressed by the overall quality of these lists, and the few which were high-quality were all-inclusive, burying the everyday words under a mountain of archaisms and esoterica. This was a long time ago, and an Internet search for word lists now turns up lists of higher quality than back then (thanks in part to the influence of 12dicts), so I will limit myself to two brief criticisms of the various lists available at that time. First, they contained far too many misspellings and typos, and had obviously never been proofread. Additionally, their approach to vocabulary was scattershot, omitting common words while adding a random selection of highly technical words, often associated with UNIX and academic computer science. (My favorite is the list which included bremsstrahlung, but omitted log and beer.) Due to my original purpose of finding a list of short, common words, I found this sort of thing particularly frustrating. One result of my frustration with this situation was my working with Mendel Cooper on ENABLE, a large Scrabble®-oriented list, which was close to unique in having an active caretaker who was clearly concerned with quality, and in being oriented towards American rather than British English. But ENABLE was an all-encompassing list and, even if it had been complete at the time I started my search for a list of common words, it would not have been what I wanted for that reason. (The ENABLE web site is no longer online, but a Google search will turn up places where you can still download it.) I finally decided that only starting from scratch with a systematic approach was likely to get me what I was looking for, and that dictionaries intended for non-native speakers of English were the best possible source for words that are in some cases so familiar that we never think of them. This has led to the 12dicts lists, which I hope have managed to avoid the flaws recited above. My other projects During the intervals between releases of 12dicts, I have been fooling around with English spelling reform. One of the results of this activity is the development of CAAPR and ABCD, both of which may be downloaded from my website, www.wyrdplay.org. CAAPR is the Combined Anglo-American Pronunciation Reference, a fancy name for a bi-dialectal pronunciation dictionary whose word list is derived primarily from the 12dicts 6of12 list. ABCD, Alan's Basic Codes with Diacritics, is also a pronunciation dictionary, of a somewhat different sort - the notation is designed to clarify when a word is spelled in accordance with normal English spelling patterns (as with fault or tunnel), and when it is not (as with fought or colonel). Though these files were developed as a result of my interest in spelling reform, they may be of interest to other "word nerds" unconcerned with that particular quixotic pastime. Click the following links to CAAPR and ABCD if interested. Conclusions When I released the first version of 12dicts in 1999, I assumed I was done with it. It hasn't worked out that way. I now think I'm pretty much done with it again, though an occasional update to neol20xx.txt might be called for. Perhaps in ten more years I'll have reached version 9, and be laughing uncontrollably at the thought that I might have finished earlier, but for the present I don't see what else might be both useful and fun to add. Feel free to send comments, suggestions, inquiries and/or large sums of money to me at 12dicts@pobox.com. (Actually, the bit about money is a joke. Do not send me even small amounts of money; 12dicts is free wordware.) After making this request in previous versions, I have been delighted to see the interest in these lists for projects ranging from interactive games to literacy programs. And I have been particularly pleased to occasionally hear of first-year Computer Science assignments specifying a 12dicts list rather than /usr/dict/ words for their input. Keep up the good work, and do let me know what you're doing. (Oh, and please put "12dicts" in the subject line when you email me. This will allow me to easily notice your mail even if it is misclassified by an overzealous filter as spam. Speaking of spam, the publication of my email address in this package has led to a marked increase in the amount of spam I receive and, ironically, much of it contains subject lines which appear to have been extracted at random from my own lists. This is a use of 12dicts of which I do not approve!) The 12dicts lists were compiled by Alan Beale. I explicitly release them to the public domain, but request acknowledgment of their use. (Actually, the dependency of the 2of12inf list and the 2+2+3 lists on AGID prevents their release into the public domain. However, I do not impose any additional requirements on their use beyond those imposed by AGID and its sources, as described in agid.txt.) - Alan Beale - ===== scowl-2020.12.07/r/alt12dicts/README ===== Unofficial Alternate 12Dicts package (Alt12Dicts) Files by Alan Beale Packaged by Kevin Atkinson Version 2020.12.07 The files contained in this archive are the result of a rather extensive conversation between me (Kevin Atkinson) and Alan Beale, the author of the 12Dicts package. I can be contacted at kevina@gnu.org and Alan Beale can be contacted at biljir@pobox.com. This archive contains almost all the information originally found in release 4 of the official 12Dicts package but in a different format as well as a good deal of additional information. This version has been updated with information from version 6.0.2 of the official 12Dicts package, Version 5 and 6 of 12Dicts include a number of new files not found in version 4; this package does not include those yet. The latest version of this package and the official 12Dicts package can be found at http://wordlist.aspell.net/ The file README-orig contains the original Readme file distributed with the official 12Dicts package. README-infl contains the Readme file for 2of12infl.txt and finally README-agid contains the Readme for AGID which 2of12infl.txt is based on. All of these files have been explicitly placed in the Public Domain by Alan Beale. 2of12full.txt description: The file 2of12full.txt contains the all words appearing in more than than one of Alan Beale's source dictionaries. Each line contains five numbers, being the total number of dictionaries, the non-variant entries, the variant entries, the non-American entries and the "second-class" entries (appearances without a separate definition). Counts of zero are replaced by hyphens. For instance, the entry 7: - 2# 5& -= aeroplane indicates that the word "aeroplane" is listed in 7 of the dictionaries. None list it as a primary American word, 2 list it as a variant form, and 5 list it as a non-American word, and none list it as a second-class word. Note that words may be marked with a "&" for either of 2 reasons. They may represent a non-American spelling of an American word, such as "aeroplane" or "gaol", or they may represent a word not normally used in American English, such as "bloke" or "lorry". Also note that there are two main kinds of second-class words - ones listed in the entry for another word without definition (usually associated with the suffixes -ly, -ness or -er/or), and ones appearing in a list of undefined words with a common prefix. Finally, observe that the numbers of non-variant, variant and non-American entries will sum to the total dictionary count, while the scond-class entry count is independent of them, except that of course it is never greater than the total count. Words marked with a colon (":") after it are abbrevations which are entirely lower-case and alphabetic. This file contains almost all the information found in the normal 12Dicts with two exceptions: 1) "Signature words" which did not appear in at least two dictionaries are not included in 2of12full 2) The sources used differ in one respect from those for the 2of12 and 6of12 files. See README-infl for a full description. signature.txt description: The file signature.txt contains a list of signature words. Signature words are words are words which failed are not in at least 6 dictionaries but Alan Beale thought should be included at the 6of12 level (see README-orig). Examples of some of the sorts of words are included are: 1. Words of the same category as other included words. An example is the astrological sign "Cancer", which alone of all the astro- logical signs fails to appear in 6 or more of the dictionaries. Similarly, the omitted holiday "Christmas Eve" was added. 2. Vulgarities, sexual terms and insults. Some such words were already included, but most of the source dictionaries were quite squeamish about them. These words are very widely known indeed; I hold that any list of "common" words which does not include the infamous f-word is simply discredited thereby. Some may feel that it would have been better to leave some or all of these terms unmentioned. Nevertheless, the expression of blasphemy, unwarranted contempt, and perverse lust, whether in words or in deeds, is a very human trait. Suppressing the evidence of these aspects of the human condition in our language makes no more sense than excluding "leprosy", "gangrene" and "dementia", no matter how unpleasant they may be to contemplate. 3. Conventional conversational phrases so common as to be practically invisible to native speakers. Examples are "thank you", "good night", "uh-huh", "of course" and "gesundheit". 4. Sports terminology, especially for football and baseball. signature2.txt description: The file signature2.txt contains inflections of irregular verbs not explicitly mentioned in 2 source dictionaries, such as "outfought" and "reheard". variants.txt description: The variants.txt file contains a subset of the words appearing in at least one of the 12 source dictionaries marked as variants or non-American. This list contains only the words which are spelling variants, words which represent different ways of saying the same thing (such as "henceforward" as a variant of "henceforth") and non-American words without a similar American form (such as "telly") have been removed. Each entry is followed by a tab, and a notation indicating which of several classes the word falls into. To describe the classes, it is best to do a little algebra. Let NV be the total number of non-variants, A the number of American variants, B the number of non-American variants, and V=A+B. Then the following annotations are to be interpreted as follows: #! - A >= B, NV = 0 &! - A < B, NV = 0 # - A >= B, V > NV & - A < B, V > NV #? - A >= B, 0.65*NV < V <= NV &? - A < B, 0.65*NV < V <= NV Simplifying, the choice between # and & indicates which variety of variant dominates, while ! and ? indicate a stronger or weaker than average agreement on variance. Additional notes on the list from Alan: I should note a couple other characteristics of this file. First of all, there are cases where spellings exist which are clearly variants of one another, but where this is not recognized by the source dictionaries. An example is the pair "levelheaded" and "level-headed". These are clearly the same word, but none of my sources lists both of them. I have chosen not to go beyond the source dictionaries and put such words on the variants list, even in obvious cases like this one. I should also note that there are cases where the question of whether 2 words are spelling variants or actually different words is not easy to answer. For instance, consider the pairs "lengthways"/"lengthwise" or "toward"/"towards". I've simply made whatever decision seemed best to me in cases like this ("lengthways" is a variant, "towards" is not), but recognize that any other observer (who could bring himself to care) would be likely to occasionally disagree. Variants.txt has not been updated for release 6, as critical information about how the list was contructed has unfortunately been lost. abbr.txt description: This file contains (almost) all the abbreviations and acronyms from the 12Dicts sources. Abbreviations which also in a list of common personal names (of about the same completeness as the ESL dictionaries) are marked with a tilda ("~") after it. There are still likely to be some abbreviations not marked with a tilda that match less common names. Additional notes from Alan: For words containing upper-case, I [Alan Beale] had not recorded whether a word was an abbreviation, so I was forced to remove the non-abbreviations from the list by hand. Because of the need to remove non-abbreviations, I limited myself to consideration of upper-case words of 6 or fewer characters. It is possible that a small number of acronyms or abbreviations longer than 6 characters might have been missed. variant-notes.txt description: The file variant-notes.txt contains some additional notes on questionable variants sent to me when I pointed out that nought was not marked as a variant. 2of12id.txt description: See README-infl 2of4brif.txt, 3esl.txt, and 5desk.txt neol2016.txt description: These files are identical to the orignal files in the 12Dicts package. See README-orig for more info. neol2016.poss description: Possessive forms for words in neol2016.txt. (Created by hand by Kevin Atkinson, not provided by Alan). signature3a.txt description: The signature phrases from 3of6all.txt. signature3g.txt description: The signature words from 3of6game.txt. signature4lem.txt description: Extra head words added to 2+2+3lem to add British/American versions of words when only one form was present, plus a few other words added for various reasons. signature4cmn.txt description: Some very common abbreviations, capitalized words and contractions not present in the BYU data, added to 2+2+3cmn.txt. 5d+2a.names2016.txt description: A short list of names of renowned individuals since 1999 (plus one government program and one social media site), added to 5d+2a.txt. ===== scowl-2020.12.07/r/infl/README ===== Automatically Generated Inflection Database (AGID) Version 2016.01.19 Copyright 2000-2016 by Kevin Atkinson The file "infl.txt" is an automatically created database of the inflected forms of words from a rather large word list. The latest version can be found at http://wordlist.aspell.net Entries are in the following form. [?]: := [[A-Za-z']]+ := := [[VNA]] := |...| := ,..., := [][{}] := [~][<][!][?] := [][:] := [[A-Za-z'_/]]+ where stuff between [ ] is optional, stuff between [[ ]] indicate a range of possible characters for that entry. If a [[ ]] is followed by a + it means the entry can consist of one or more characters in that range. { } are literal. A typical entry will look like WORD V: WORDed, WORed 2, WORD {EXPL} | WORDing, WORing 2 | WORDs is V for verb, N for noun, or A or adjective or adverb. If is followed by a ? that means that the part-of-speech was not in the part-of-speech database however the inflected forms of the word where found in the word list. The inflected forms are in the following order for verbs (except for a few special verbs): [] <-ing form> <-s form> and for adjective or adverbs: <-er form> <-est form> Each form is seperated by a ' | '. Special cases: be: <2d singular, plural, past subjunctive> <2d singular> <3d singular> wit: <2d singular> An absence of a variant level implies a variant level of 0. Two words with the same whole number variant level are considered almost equal with a slight preference given to the entry with a lower number. A whole number variant level of 1 indicates a less preferred form of the word. A whole number variant level of 2 indicates any number of things. It could mean that it is from an archaic use of the word, or a variant that is hardly ever used or for an extremely obscure meaning of the word, or finally it could mean that the word looked like it could possibly be a inflected form of the base word but I could not find any evidence for them. If two words have the same variant level and explanation it means that both inflections were found and the script was not sure which one to use. Sometimes the inflected form to use depends on the meaning of the word. If this is the case the two entries will have different explanations. If the distinction can be made in a few words it is given with underscores (_) replacing spaces. Otherwise the two entries will have different distinguishing numbers. A < after a word means that there is a good change that this is an inflected form of the word, a ~ after a word means that there is a slight chance. A ! after a word indicates that the word is likely an inflections of a similar word (generally one ending in e) and not the current word. A ? after a word means that the word was not in the word list but if it was it would be considered an inflected form of the base word. This verson is now almost as accurate as Alan Beale's 2of12id file distributed with the "Unofficial Alternate 12 Dicts Package" for the base words which have an entry in 2of12id.txt with a few notable exceptions. The most obvious one is the "person" entry. Alan Beale considers, based on what his sources have told him, that "persons" is the proper plural for "person" and "people" is considered a variant. I however disagree and decided to consider "people" the primary form and "persons" as the sligtly less perfered variant based on my own experence and http://www.quinion.com/words/usagenotes/un-person.htm which says: The normal plural of person was persons ... However, there is evidence from Chaucer onwards that some writers chose to use people as a plural for person, not only in the generalised sense of 'an uncountable or indistinct mass of individuals' but also in specific countable cases. ... Though persons survives, it does so largely in formal or legal contexts ...From the evidence, it seems that the trend towards using people instead of persons is accelerating and that it may not be so long before persons vanishes from the language except in certain set phrases. I considered making "persons" a variant (level 1), but I decided against it as "persons" is for the most part perfectly acceptable and probably considered the proper plural to use by some. I also considered the -people ending the primary form for all words ending in -person such as salesperson and the -persons entry the slightly less preferred variant in spite of what 2of12id.txt said. In some cases a variant of level 2 is listed in AGID where it is not listed at all in 2of12id. In general this means that the script came up with the possibility and, in spite it not being listed in 2of12id, it seams logical to me. The final case occurs when a word has two or more -s inflections used as both noun and verb forms, and these forms would have different variant levels in 2of12id. For example: ditto N: dittos, dittoes 1 ditto V: dittoed | dittoing | dittos, dittoes 0.1 For purely technical reasons and because I do not feel that it matters too much I have made the variant levels for the -s forms the same. For example the ditto entries became: ditto N: dittos, dittoes 0.1 ditto V: dittoed | dittoing | dittos, dittoes 0.1 The choice of the variant levels I used is somewhat arbitrary but I in general went with the lower level. Fell free to send me corrections to correct any of these questionable words. I am mostly interested in the preferred form of the word when the script was not able to decide or words marked with < or ~ that are valid inflected forms of the words. Also included in this version are the files "variant_0.lst", "variant_1.lst", "variant_2.lst", and "variant.tab". The files "variant_#.lst" include all of the inflected forms at the given level found in infl.txt which are not generally considered to be some other common word. The file variant.tab contains a cross reference of all alternate forms of inflected form of words. The file variant-wroot.tab is like variant.tab except that it also included the root form of the word. Words are in mixed case but all accents have been striped thus words like café are instead cafe. The file "variant" contains a list of alternate inflections. The file "irregular" contains extra information where a noun or verb has irregular inflected forms. The file "dontuse" contains a list of words not to consider an inflected form of a word if more than one inflected form of a word is found. The files "prefixes" and "suffixes" contains a list of common prefixes and suffixes respectfully. These files are used by the script to produce inflected forms for words that end in a word in the "irregular" file. If the beginning appears in the word list or the prefixes file and the ending appears in the irregular file I also consider +. If the prefix is 3 letters or more OR appears in the prefixes file and the suffix is 4 letters or more OR appears in the suffixes file I consider it the most likely choice, otherwise I consider it as a possible candidate but not the most likely choice. The file "make-infl" is the actual Perl script used to create the data base. The file "find-var" is the Perl script used to create the variant lists and cross reference file. The file "make-all" was used to create the word list used by the script. CHANGES: From Ver 2014.08.11 to 2016.01.19 Avoid hard coding the input files in the make-infl script. No changes to the data files. From Rev 4 to Ver 2014.08.11 Misc. changes to sync up with what is being used by SCOWL. From Revision 3a to 4 (January 2, 2003) Added variant-wroot.tab Update find-var script to also produce variant-wroot.tab. From Revision 3 to 3a (April 04, 2001) Fixed a bug in the find-var script which caused some common words which are variants for one usage of a word but not variants for any other common usage to improperly appear in the variant list. From Revision 2 to 3 (January 28, 2001) Changed the format of infl.txt to something which is slightly harder to read but a lot less ambiguous and easier to parse. Update various files, including the actual script, so that the output that is almost as accurate of Alan Beale 2of12id.txt Eliminated Moby Words and ABLE from the word list used by the script to give more accurate results. From Revision 1 to 2 (August 18, 2000) Classified variants as either almost equal, also used, or secondary. The / is now used to indicate equal variants. "/?" is now used to mean what "/" used to be. Lots of additional rules added which greatly improved the results. COPYRIGHT AND SOURCE: The final product is under the following copyright, as well as any copyrights mentioned below. Copyright 2000-2014 by Kevin Atkinson Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute and sell this database, the associated scripts, the output created form the scripts and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice appears in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation. Kevin Atkinson makes no representations about the suitability of this array for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty. The part-of-speech database is taken from Alan Beale 2of12id and the WordNet database which is under the following copyright: This software and database is being provided to you, the LICENSEE, by Princeton University under the following license. By obtaining, using and/or copying this software and database, you agree that you have read, understood, and will comply with these terms and conditions.: Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute this software and database and its documentation for any purpose and without fee or royalty is hereby granted, provided that you agree to comply with the following copyright notice and statements, including the disclaimer, and that the same appear on ALL copies of the software, database and documentation, including modifications that you make for internal use or for distribution. WordNet 1.6 Copyright 1997 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. THIS SOFTWARE AND DATABASE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND PRINCETON UNIVERSITY MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. BY WAY OF EXAMPLE, BUT NOT LIMITATION, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF MERCHANT- ABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR THAT THE USE OF THE LICENSED SOFTWARE, DATABASE OR DOCUMENTATION WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY THIRD PARTY PATENTS, COPYRIGHTS, TRADEMARKS OR OTHER RIGHTS. The name of Princeton University or Princeton may not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software and/or database. Title to copyright in this software, database and any associated documentation shall at all times remain with Princeton University and LICENSEE agrees to preserve same. Alan Beale 2of12id.txt is indirectly derived from the Moby part-of-speech database and the WordNet database. The Moby part-of-speech is in the public domain: The Moby lexicon project is complete and has been place into the public domain. Use, sell, rework, excerpt and use in any way on any platform. Placing this material on internal or public servers is also encouraged. The compiler is not aware of any export restrictions so freely distribute world-wide. You can verify the public domain status by contacting Grady Ward 3449 Martha Ct. Arcata, CA 95521-4884 grady@netcom.com grady@northcoast.com The word list used is a combination of several word list: 1) The ENABLE2K word lists which is in the public domain: The ENABLE master word list, WORD.LST, is herewith formally released into the Public Domain. Anyone is free to use it or distribute it in any manner they see fit. No fee or registration is required for its use nor are "contributions" solicited (if you feel you absolutely must contribute something for your own peace of mind, the authors of the ENABLE list ask that you make a donation on their behalf to your favorite charity). This word list is our gift to the Scrabble community, as an alternate to "official" word lists. Game designers may feel free to incorporate the WORD.LST into their games. Please mention the source and credit us as originators of the list. Note that if you, as a game designer, use the WORD.LST in your product, you may still copyright and protect your product, but you may *not* legally copyright or in any way restrict redistribution of the WORD.LST portion of your product. This *may* under law restrict your rights to restrict your users' rights, but that is only fair. 2) All of the word lists except ABLE.LST in the ENABLE2K Supplemnt which consists of: 2DICTS.LST ALSO.LST LETTERS.LST OSPDADD.LST UCACR.LST LCACR.LST NOPOS.LST PLURALS.LST UPPER.LST All of these word lists are also in the public domain. 3) The list of signature words from the YAWL package which is in the public domain. 4) The UK Advanced Cryptics Dictionary which in under the following copyright: Copyright (c) J Ross Beresford 1993-1999. All Rights Reserved. The following restriction is placed on the use of this publication: if The UK Advanced Cryptics Dictionary is used in a software package or redistributed in any form, the copyright notice must be prominently displayed and the text of this document must be included verbatim. There are no other restrictions: I would like to see the list distributed as widely as possible. 5) Some extra words found in the Part-Of-Speech database that was not found in any of the above word lists. 6) Words found in the Jargon File Word List package, available at http://aspell.sourceforge.net/wl/, which is in the Public Domain. 7) Words in 2of12id.txt not in any of the word lists above. 2of12id is indirectly derived from all the above sources and most of the word lists from the Moby Words package: 10196pla.ces 113809of.fic 21986na.mes 256772co.mpo 354984si.ngl 3897male.nam 4160offi.cia 4946fema.len 6213acro.nym 74550com.mon The Moby Word package, like the Part-Of-Speech database is in the public domain. 8) And finally some extra words that I added myself. These words can be found in the file "extra-words" The "dontuse", "irregular", and "variant" file was created by me (Kevin Atkinson) from numerous sources.