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 2017.01.22 to 2017.08.24
122 From Version 2016.11.20 to 2017.01.22
126 From Version 2016.06.26 to 2016.11.20
128 New Australian spelling category thanks to the work of Benjamin
129 Titze (btitze@protonmail.ch)
133 From Version 2016.01.19 to 2016.06.26
137 Updated to Version 6.0.2 of 12dicts
141 From Version 2015.08.24 to 2016.01.19
145 Clarified README to indicate why the 60 size is the preferred size
148 Remove some very uncommon possessive forms.
150 Change "SET UTF8" to "SET UTF-8" in hunspell affix file.
152 From Version 2015.05.18 to 2015.08.24 (Aug 24, 2015)
156 From Version 2015.04.24 to 2015.05.18 (May 18, 2015)
158 Added some new words found to have a high frequency in the COCA
159 corpus. (http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/).
161 Fix en spelling suggestions for 'alot' and 'exersize' in hunspell
162 dictionary (upstreamed from the changes made in Firefox).
164 From Version 2015.02.15 to 2015.04.24 (April 24, 2015)
166 Added some new words.
168 Convert hunspell dictionary to UTF-8 in order to handle smart
171 From Version 2015.01.28 to 2015.02.15 (February 15, 2015)
173 Added a large number of neologisms (newly invented words)
174 such as "selfie" and "smartwatch" thanks to Alan Beale.
176 Various other new words.
178 Clean up the special-hacker category by removing some words that
179 didn't exist in the Google Book's Corpus (1980 - 2008) and
180 originated from the "Unofficial Jargon File Word Lists".
182 From Version 2014.11.17 to 2015.01.28 (January 28, 2015)
184 Various new words, many from analyzing the Google Book's Corpus
185 (1980 - 2008). See http://app.aspell.net/lookup-freq.
187 Moved some uncommon words that can easily hide a misspelling of a
188 more common word to level 70. (calender, adrenalin and Joesph)
190 Removed several -er and -est forms from adjectives that were so
191 uncommon that they were not found anywhere is the Google Book's
192 Corpus (1980 - 2008).
194 From Version 2014.08.11.1 to 2014.11.17 (November 17, 2014)
198 Fix typo in Hunspell readme.
200 From Version 2014.08.11 to 2014.08.11.1 (August 13, 2014)
202 Forgot to mention this important change from 7.1 to 2014.08.11:
204 Shifted the variant levels up by one: variant_0 is now variant_1,
205 variant_1 is now variant_2, and variant_2 is now variant_3.
207 Other minor fixes in this README.
209 No changes to the contents of the lists.
211 From Revision 7.1 to Version 2014.08.11 (August 11, 2014)
213 Added some missing possessive forms.
215 Added some new words and proper names.
217 Clean up the categories (words, upper, proper-names etc) so that they
220 Convert documentation to UTF-8. For now, the wordlist are still in
221 ISO-8859-1 to prevent compatibility problems.
223 Add schema and scripts for creating a SQLite database from SCOWL.
224 Add some utility and library functions using them. This database is
225 used by the new web app's (http://app.aspell.net/lookup & create).
227 Enhance speller/make-hunspell-dict. The biggest improvement is that
228 it that it now generates several more dictionaries in addition to
229 the official ones. These additional dictionaries are ones for
230 British English and larger dictionaries that include up to SCOWL
233 From Revision 7 to 7.1 (January 6, 2011)
235 Updated to revision 5.1 of Varcon which corrected several errors.
237 Fixed various problems with the variant processing which corrected a
240 Added several now common proper names and some other words now
243 Include misc/ and speller/ directory which were in SVN but left
244 out of the release tarball.
246 Other minor fixes, including some fixes to the taboo word lists.
248 From Revision 6 to 7 (December 27, 2010)
250 Updated to revision 5.0 of Varcon which corrected many errors,
251 especially in the British and Canadian spelling categories. Also
252 added new spelling categories for the British and Canadian spelling
253 variants and separated them out from the main variant_* categories.
255 Moved Moby names lists (3897male.nam 4946fema.len 21986na.mes) to 95
256 level since they contain too many errors and rare names.
258 Moved frequently class 0 from Brian Kelk's Wordlist from
259 level 60 to 70, and also filter it with level 80 due to, too many
262 Many other minor fixes.
264 From Revision 5 to 6 (August 10, 2004)
266 Updated to version 4.0 of the 12dicts package.
268 Included the 3esl, 2of4brif, and 5desk list from the new 12dicts
269 package. The 3esl was included in the 40 size, the 2of4brif in the
270 55 size and the 5desk in the 70 size.
272 Removed the Ispell word list as it was a source of too many errors.
273 This eliminated the 65 size.
275 Removed clause 4 from the Ispell copyright with permission of Geoff
278 Updated to version 4.1 of VarCon.
280 Added the "british_z" spelling category which is British using the
283 From Revision 4a to 5 (January 3, 2002)
285 Added variants that were not really spelling variants (such as
286 forwards) back into the main list.
288 Fixed a bug which caused variants of words to incorrectly appear in
289 the non-variant lists.
291 Moved rarely used inflections of a word into higher number lists.
293 Added other inflections of a words based on the following criteria
294 If the word is in the base form: only include that word.
295 If the word is in a plural form: include the base word and the plural
296 If the word is a verb form (other than plural): include all verb forms
297 If the word is an ad* form: include all ad* forms
298 If the word is in a possessive form: also include the non-possessive
300 Updated to the latest version of many of the source dictionaries.
302 Removed the DEC Word List due to the questionable licence and
303 because removing it will not seriously decrease the quality of SCOWL
304 (there are a few less proper names).
306 From Revision 4 to 4a (April 4, 2001)
308 Reran the scripts on a never version of AGID (3a) which fixes a bug
309 which caused some common words to be improperly marked as variants.
311 From Revision 3 to 4 (January 28, 2001)
313 Split the variant "spelling category" up into 3 different levels.
315 Added words in the Ispell word list at the 65 level.
317 Other changes due to using more recent versions of various sources
318 included a more accurate version of AGID thanks to the work of
321 From Revision 2 to 3 (August 18, 2000)
323 Renamed special-unix-terms to special-hacker and added a large
324 number of commonly used words within the hacker (not cracker)
327 Added a couple more signature words including "newbie".
329 Minor changes due to changes in the inflection database.
331 From Revision 1 to 2 (August 5, 2000)
333 Moved the male and female name lists from the mwords package and the
334 DEC name lists form the 50 level to the 60 level and moved Alan's
335 name list from the 60 level to the 50 level. Also added the top
336 1000 male, female, and last names from the 1990 Census report to the
337 50 level. This reduced the number of names in the 50 level from
340 Added a large number of Uppercase words to the 50 level.
342 Properly accented the possessive form of some words.
344 Minor other changes due to changes in my raw data files which have
345 not been released yet. Email if you are interested in these files.
347 COPYRIGHT, SOURCES, and CREDITS:
351 The variant word lists were created from a list of variants found in
352 the 12dicts supplement package as well as a list of variants I created
355 The Readmes for the various packages used can be found in the
356 appropriate directory under the r/ directory.
360 The process of "sort"s, "comm"s, and Perl scripts to combine the many
361 word lists and separate out the variant information is inexact and
362 error prone. The whole things needs to be rewritten to deal with
363 words in terms of lemmas. When the exact lemma is not known a best
364 guess should be made. I'm not sure what form this should be in. I
365 originally thought this should be some sort of database, but maybe I
366 should just slurp all that data into memory and process it in one
367 giant perl script. With the amount of memory available these days (at
368 least 2 GB, often 4 GB or more) this should not really be a problem.
370 In addition, there is a very nice frequency analyze of the BNC corpus
371 done by Adam Kilgarriff. Unlike Brian's word lists the BNC lists
372 include part of speech information. I plan on somehow using these
373 lists as Adam Kilgarriff has given me the OK to use it in SCOWL.
374 These lists will greatly reduce the problem of inflected forms of a
375 word appearing at different levels due to the part-of-speech
378 There is frequency information for some other corpus such as COCA
379 (Corpus of Contemporary American English) and ANS (American National
380 Corpus) which I might also be able to use. The former will require
381 permission, and the latter is of questionable quality.
383 RECREATING THE WORD LISTS:
385 In order to recreate the word lists you need a modern version of Perl,
386 bash, the traditional set of shell utilities, a system that supports
387 symbolic links, and quite possibly GNU Make. The easiest way to
388 recreate the word lists is to checkout the corresponding Git version
389 (see the version string at the start of the file) and simply type
390 "make" (see http://wordlist.aspell.net). You can try to download all
391 the pieces manually, but this method is not no longer tested nor
394 The src/ directory contains the numerous scripts used in the creation
395 of the final product.
397 The r/ directory contains the raw data used to create the final
398 product. If you checkout from Git this directory should be populated
399 automatically for you. If you insist on doing it the hard way see the
400 README file in the r/ directory for more information.
402 The l/ directory contains symbolic links used by the actual scripts.
404 Finally, the working/ directory is where all the intermittent files go
405 that are not specific to one source.