1 Spell Checking Oriented Word Lists (SCOWL)
2 @`if [ "$SCOWL_VERSION" ]; then echo -n "Version $SCOWL_VERSION"; fi`
3 @`git log --pretty=format:'%cd [%h]' -n 1 --`
4 by Kevin Atkinson (kevina@gnu.org)
6 The SCOWL is a collection of word lists split up in various sizes, and
7 other categories, intended to be suitable for use in spell checkers.
8 However, I am sure it will have numerous other uses as well.
10 The latest version can be found at http://wordlist.aspell.net/.
12 The directory final/ contains the actual word lists broken up into
13 various sizes and categories. The r/ directory contains Readmes from
14 the various sources used to create this package.
16 The misc/ contains a small list of taboo words, see the README file
17 for more info. The speller/ directory contains scripts for creating
18 spelling dictionaries for Aspell and Hunspell.
20 The other directories contain the necessary information to recreate the
21 word lists from the raw data. Unless you are interested in improving the
22 words lists you should not need to worry about what's here. See the
23 section on recreating the words lists for more information on what's
26 Except for the special word lists the files follow the following
28 <spelling category>-<sub-category>.<size>
29 Where the spelling category is one of
30 english, american, british, british_z, canadian, australian
31 variant_1, variant_2, variant_3,
32 british_variant_1, british_variant_2,
33 canadian_variant_1, canadian_variant_2,
34 australian_variant_1, australian_variant_2
35 Sub-category is one of
36 abbreviations, contractions, proper-names, upper, words
38 10, 20, 35 (small), 40, 50 (medium), 55, 60, 70 (large),
39 80 (huge), 95 (insane)
40 The special word lists follow are in the following format:
41 special-<description>.<size>
42 Where description is one of:
43 roman-numerals, hacker
45 The perl script "mk-list" can be used to create a word list of the
46 desired size, its usage is:
47 ./mk-list [-f] [-v#] <spelling categories> <size>
48 where <spelling categories> is one of the above spelling categories
49 (the english and special categories are automatically included as well
50 as all sub-categories) and <size> is the desired size. The
51 "-v" option can be used to also include the appropriate
52 variants file up to level '#'. The normal output will be a sorted
53 word list. If you rather see what files will be included, use the
56 When manually combining the words lists the "english" spelling
57 category should be used as well as one of "american", "british",
58 "british_z" (british with ize spelling), "canadian" or "australian".
59 Great care has been taken so that only one spelling for any particular
60 word is included in the main list (with some minor exceptions). When
61 two variants were considered equal I randomly picked one for inclusion
62 in the main word list. Unfortunately this means that my choice in how
63 to spell a word may not match your choice. If this is the case you
64 can try including one of the "variant_1" spelling categories which
65 includes most variants which are considered almost equal. The
66 "variant_1" spelling category corresponds mostly to American variants,
67 while the "british_variant_1", "canadian_variant_1" and
68 "australian_variant_1" are for British, Canadian and Australian
69 variants, respectively. The "variant_2" spelling categories include
70 variants which are also generally considered acceptable, and
71 "variant_3" contains variants which are seldom used and may not even
72 be considered correct. There is no "british_variant_3",
73 "canadian_variant_3" or "australian_variant_3" spelling category since
74 the distinction would be almost meaningless.
76 The "abbreviation" category includes abbreviations and acronyms which
77 are not also normal words. The "contractions" category should be self
78 explanatory. The "upper" category includes upper case words and proper
79 names which are common enough to appear in a typical dictionary. The
80 "proper-names" category includes all the additional uppercase words.
81 Finally the "words" category contains all the normal English words.
83 To give you an idea of what the words in the various sizes look like
84 here is a sample of 25 random words found only in that size:
86 @`src/rand-samples | iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8`
88 And here is a count on the number of words in each spelling category
89 (american + english spelling category):
93 (The "Words" column does not include the name count.)
95 Size 35 is the recommended small size, 50 the medium and 70 the large.
96 Sizes 70 and below contain words found in most dictionaries while the
97 80 size contains all the strange and unusual words people like to use
98 in word games such as Scrabble (TM). While a lot of the words in the
99 80 size are not used very often, they are all generally considered
100 valid words in the English language. The 95 contains just about every
101 English word in existence and then some. Many of the words at the 95
102 level will probably not be considered valid English words by most
105 For spell checking I recommend using size 60. This size is the
106 largest size that I am fairly confident does not contain any
107 misspellings or invalid words. In addition an effort is made to
108 exclude valid yet problematic words (such as "calender") from the 60
109 size that are likely to be a misspelling of a more common word. The
110 70 size is reasonable for those wanting a larger list and don't mind a
111 few errors. The 80 or larger sizes are not reasonable for spell
114 Accents are present on certain words such as café in iso8859-1 format.
118 From Version 2018.04.16 to 2019.10.06
122 Remove compare's and fail's.
124 From Version 2017.08.24 to 2018.04.16
128 Fix build problems on macOS.
130 From Version 2017.01.22 to 2017.08.24
134 From Version 2016.11.20 to 2017.01.22
138 From Version 2016.06.26 to 2016.11.20
140 New Australian spelling category thanks to the work of Benjamin
141 Titze (btitze@protonmail.ch)
145 From Version 2016.01.19 to 2016.06.26
149 Updated to Version 6.0.2 of 12dicts
153 From Version 2015.08.24 to 2016.01.19
157 Clarified README to indicate why the 60 size is the preferred size
160 Remove some very uncommon possessive forms.
162 Change "SET UTF8" to "SET UTF-8" in hunspell affix file.
164 From Version 2015.05.18 to 2015.08.24 (Aug 24, 2015)
168 From Version 2015.04.24 to 2015.05.18 (May 18, 2015)
170 Added some new words found to have a high frequency in the COCA
171 corpus. (http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/).
173 Fix en spelling suggestions for 'alot' and 'exersize' in hunspell
174 dictionary (upstreamed from the changes made in Firefox).
176 From Version 2015.02.15 to 2015.04.24 (April 24, 2015)
178 Added some new words.
180 Convert hunspell dictionary to UTF-8 in order to handle smart
183 From Version 2015.01.28 to 2015.02.15 (February 15, 2015)
185 Added a large number of neologisms (newly invented words)
186 such as "selfie" and "smartwatch" thanks to Alan Beale.
188 Various other new words.
190 Clean up the special-hacker category by removing some words that
191 didn't exist in the Google Book's Corpus (1980 - 2008) and
192 originated from the "Unofficial Jargon File Word Lists".
194 From Version 2014.11.17 to 2015.01.28 (January 28, 2015)
196 Various new words, many from analyzing the Google Book's Corpus
197 (1980 - 2008). See http://app.aspell.net/lookup-freq.
199 Moved some uncommon words that can easily hide a misspelling of a
200 more common word to level 70. (calender, adrenalin and Joesph)
202 Removed several -er and -est forms from adjectives that were so
203 uncommon that they were not found anywhere is the Google Book's
204 Corpus (1980 - 2008).
206 From Version 2014.08.11.1 to 2014.11.17 (November 17, 2014)
210 Fix typo in Hunspell readme.
212 From Version 2014.08.11 to 2014.08.11.1 (August 13, 2014)
214 Forgot to mention this important change from 7.1 to 2014.08.11:
216 Shifted the variant levels up by one: variant_0 is now variant_1,
217 variant_1 is now variant_2, and variant_2 is now variant_3.
219 Other minor fixes in this README.
221 No changes to the contents of the lists.
223 From Revision 7.1 to Version 2014.08.11 (August 11, 2014)
225 Added some missing possessive forms.
227 Added some new words and proper names.
229 Clean up the categories (words, upper, proper-names etc) so that they
232 Convert documentation to UTF-8. For now, the wordlist are still in
233 ISO-8859-1 to prevent compatibility problems.
235 Add schema and scripts for creating a SQLite database from SCOWL.
236 Add some utility and library functions using them. This database is
237 used by the new web app's (http://app.aspell.net/lookup & create).
239 Enhance speller/make-hunspell-dict. The biggest improvement is that
240 it that it now generates several more dictionaries in addition to
241 the official ones. These additional dictionaries are ones for
242 British English and larger dictionaries that include up to SCOWL
245 From Revision 7 to 7.1 (January 6, 2011)
247 Updated to revision 5.1 of Varcon which corrected several errors.
249 Fixed various problems with the variant processing which corrected a
252 Added several now common proper names and some other words now
255 Include misc/ and speller/ directory which were in SVN but left
256 out of the release tarball.
258 Other minor fixes, including some fixes to the taboo word lists.
260 From Revision 6 to 7 (December 27, 2010)
262 Updated to revision 5.0 of Varcon which corrected many errors,
263 especially in the British and Canadian spelling categories. Also
264 added new spelling categories for the British and Canadian spelling
265 variants and separated them out from the main variant_* categories.
267 Moved Moby names lists (3897male.nam 4946fema.len 21986na.mes) to 95
268 level since they contain too many errors and rare names.
270 Moved frequently class 0 from Brian Kelk's Wordlist from
271 level 60 to 70, and also filter it with level 80 due to, too many
274 Many other minor fixes.
276 From Revision 5 to 6 (August 10, 2004)
278 Updated to version 4.0 of the 12dicts package.
280 Included the 3esl, 2of4brif, and 5desk list from the new 12dicts
281 package. The 3esl was included in the 40 size, the 2of4brif in the
282 55 size and the 5desk in the 70 size.
284 Removed the Ispell word list as it was a source of too many errors.
285 This eliminated the 65 size.
287 Removed clause 4 from the Ispell copyright with permission of Geoff
290 Updated to version 4.1 of VarCon.
292 Added the "british_z" spelling category which is British using the
295 From Revision 4a to 5 (January 3, 2002)
297 Added variants that were not really spelling variants (such as
298 forwards) back into the main list.
300 Fixed a bug which caused variants of words to incorrectly appear in
301 the non-variant lists.
303 Moved rarely used inflections of a word into higher number lists.
305 Added other inflections of a words based on the following criteria
306 If the word is in the base form: only include that word.
307 If the word is in a plural form: include the base word and the plural
308 If the word is a verb form (other than plural): include all verb forms
309 If the word is an ad* form: include all ad* forms
310 If the word is in a possessive form: also include the non-possessive
312 Updated to the latest version of many of the source dictionaries.
314 Removed the DEC Word List due to the questionable licence and
315 because removing it will not seriously decrease the quality of SCOWL
316 (there are a few less proper names).
318 From Revision 4 to 4a (April 4, 2001)
320 Reran the scripts on a never version of AGID (3a) which fixes a bug
321 which caused some common words to be improperly marked as variants.
323 From Revision 3 to 4 (January 28, 2001)
325 Split the variant "spelling category" up into 3 different levels.
327 Added words in the Ispell word list at the 65 level.
329 Other changes due to using more recent versions of various sources
330 included a more accurate version of AGID thanks to the work of
333 From Revision 2 to 3 (August 18, 2000)
335 Renamed special-unix-terms to special-hacker and added a large
336 number of commonly used words within the hacker (not cracker)
339 Added a couple more signature words including "newbie".
341 Minor changes due to changes in the inflection database.
343 From Revision 1 to 2 (August 5, 2000)
345 Moved the male and female name lists from the mwords package and the
346 DEC name lists form the 50 level to the 60 level and moved Alan's
347 name list from the 60 level to the 50 level. Also added the top
348 1000 male, female, and last names from the 1990 Census report to the
349 50 level. This reduced the number of names in the 50 level from
352 Added a large number of Uppercase words to the 50 level.
354 Properly accented the possessive form of some words.
356 Minor other changes due to changes in my raw data files which have
357 not been released yet. Email if you are interested in these files.
359 COPYRIGHT, SOURCES, and CREDITS:
363 The variant word lists were created from a list of variants found in
364 the 12dicts supplement package as well as a list of variants I created
367 The Readmes for the various packages used can be found in the
368 appropriate directory under the r/ directory.
372 The process of "sort"s, "comm"s, and Perl scripts to combine the many
373 word lists and separate out the variant information is inexact and
374 error prone. The whole things needs to be rewritten to deal with
375 words in terms of lemmas. When the exact lemma is not known a best
376 guess should be made. I'm not sure what form this should be in. I
377 originally thought this should be some sort of database, but maybe I
378 should just slurp all that data into memory and process it in one
379 giant perl script. With the amount of memory available these days (at
380 least 2 GB, often 4 GB or more) this should not really be a problem.
382 In addition, there is a very nice frequency analyze of the BNC corpus
383 done by Adam Kilgarriff. Unlike Brian's word lists the BNC lists
384 include part of speech information. I plan on somehow using these
385 lists as Adam Kilgarriff has given me the OK to use it in SCOWL.
386 These lists will greatly reduce the problem of inflected forms of a
387 word appearing at different levels due to the part-of-speech
390 There is frequency information for some other corpus such as COCA
391 (Corpus of Contemporary American English) and ANS (American National
392 Corpus) which I might also be able to use. The former will require
393 permission, and the latter is of questionable quality.
395 RECREATING THE WORD LISTS:
397 In order to recreate the word lists you need a modern version of Perl,
398 bash, the traditional set of shell utilities, a system that supports
399 symbolic links, and quite possibly GNU Make. The easiest way to
400 recreate the word lists is to checkout the corresponding Git version
401 (see the version string at the start of the file) and simply type
402 "make" (see http://wordlist.aspell.net). You can try to download all
403 the pieces manually, but this method is not no longer tested nor
406 The src/ directory contains the numerous scripts used in the creation
407 of the final product.
409 The r/ directory contains the raw data used to create the final
410 product. If you checkout from Git this directory should be populated
411 automatically for you. If you insist on doing it the hard way see the
412 README file in the r/ directory for more information.
414 The l/ directory contains symbolic links used by the actual scripts.
416 Finally, the working/ directory is where all the intermittent files go
417 that are not specific to one source.