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Hi I'm writing a game where the player has to connect a group of letters to form words. Something like bookworm but it will be very different I hope.

The point of the question is that I need to build a dictionary of words.

I made a simple java program that crawls the web and extracts words, but a lot of trash is mixed with the good words and it's impossible to clean it. I'm talking about 100,000 words.

Is there any dictionary available that can be freely used or anybody has an idea of how to build one?

Thanks!

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5 Answers

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This website has a list of 58,112 (British) English words available in uppercase or lowercase formats.

This other website has a variety of word lists available, but I'd recommend checking out the "Official 12Dicts Package", which can be downloaded from here, as it has been rigorously checked for errors and provides better documentation than most lists out there. The lists in this package contain approximately 40,000 words.

In terms of minimal effort on your part, I believe the resources above are probably your best solution

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I've used the 12Dicts package for a Scrabble solver. It worked very well. – Mashmagar Oct 19 '10 at 21:05
Well this is what's most close to what I was looking for, So I choose this answer. The other answers gives great resources too, so thanks to all. – Damian Oct 21 '10 at 1:25
up vote 7 down vote

The following site is attempting to accumulate links to different open dictionary projects. If I understand what they're doing correctly, they are offering dictionary packages that you could potentially download and read with your application. Hopefully this leads you in a helpful direction.

Open Dictionary Databases

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I've downloaded about 10 and I can't find one with a list of words. A regular dictionary is not useful to me because some words will not be present, like plurals and verb conjugations. – Damian Oct 18 '10 at 22:42
You might want to edit your original question to be specific about what kind of words you need then? – Kylotan Oct 19 '10 at 15:28
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The Moby project is the biggest one I know of. It's also the source for Fedora's "words" package for example, at least in English.

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This one seems pretty nice, though I don't know about compared to others.

Seems to be in an easily parsable and readable format too.

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Hmm.. look at the first lines: aa, aah, aahed, aahing, aahs, aal, aalii, aaliis, aals... and continues like that. It seems like having the same trash that I got parsing the web. – Damian Oct 18 '10 at 21:54
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It doesn't continue like that, and they are all words. Aa is a kind of lava, aah through to aahs are exclamations, and allii sounds like a word. – The Communist Duck Oct 19 '10 at 15:32
@Damian, @The Allii is a word, and looking at these they all are. There are, alot, of words. I think Damian is searching for a more generic and easy list. But this is an awesome resource, +1 – Noctrine♦ Oct 19 '10 at 17:15
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I performed something recently where i ripped every word out of war and peace whilst it does not contain every single word in the dictionary it does have the added benefit of being able to tally word usage to get an idea of usage distribution you will also find slang words and names however, although these can be filtered rather simply

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