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

Regards,

Moosie

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

 

Have you ever seen a full set of the OED?

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

 

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

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

 

$ls /usr/share/dict

american-english british-english spanish words

 

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

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

something like ibritish or ienglish for ispell

myspell

stardict...

 

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

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

 

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

"a" is not in there

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

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

 

Chemkid

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

 

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

 

http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/

 

whatcha doing, btw?