Dictionaries and Word Games

[Bluecat]

One of the games that I am thinking of doing is a small puzzle game that tests a players spelling ability. I've noticed a few other word games about, and I was wondering where the dictionaries for these games come from. For those of you who have done games of this type:

Do you create your own dictionaries, or do you acquire them from third parties?

If you create your own, how do you go about it?

If you acquire your dictionaries, where do you get them from?

Do you know of any free dictionaries around that are highly comprehensive?

cheers

John

[tolik]

One idea: ispell.
Check it's licensing, I guess it should be quite open.

[mahlzeit]

Check this out:
http://personal.riverusers.com/~theg.../software.html

The ENABLE and YAWL lists are freely distributable word lists. They are huge. Of course, these are only word lists: they don't contain the definitions of the words just like a real dictionary does.

[MadSage]

There are free dictionaries available for download on the internet - don't let anyone talk you into paying for one, like some people here have done.

I wish I could remember where I got mine from. I downloaded it from some university FTP site, and it contained over 100,000 words. As a Scrabble player myself, I noticed lots of obscure words (such as 2 letter words) which were not in the dictionary, so I added those in myself, making almost 118000 words. It's very frustrating to play a word game that doesn't except words you know exist. To make sure I only added real words, I checked them on Scrabble word lists and dictionary sites like dictionary.com

This crossword solver program contains a dictionary in plain text format which contains over 110,000 words - http://freespace.virgin.net/martin.m...s/wincross.zip


MadSage


Edit: Just saw that previous post... puts my dictionary to shame ^^;

[TamLin]

There's WordNet , "a lexical database for the English language," maintained by Princeton University.

[Bluecat]

Thanks everyone. It looks like the YAWL is the way to go. Over 264,000 words is pretty cool, even if there are over 615,000 words in the English language. Considering most people have an average vocabulary of between 10,000 and 20,000 words, the YAWL should suffice!

cheers

John