New upstream version 2017.08.24

[deb_pkgs/scowl.git] / README.in

Spell Checking Oriented Word Lists (SCOWL)
@`if [ "$SCOWL_VERSION" ]; then echo -n "Version $SCOWL_VERSION"; fi`
@`git log --pretty=format:'%cd [%h]' -n 1 --`
by Kevin Atkinson (kevina@gnu.org)

The SCOWL is a collection of word lists split up in various sizes, and
other categories, intended to be suitable for use in spell checkers.
However, I am sure it will have numerous other uses as well.

The latest version can be found at http://wordlist.aspell.net/.

The directory final/ contains the actual word lists broken up into
various sizes and categories.  The r/ directory contains Readmes from
the various sources used to create this package.

The misc/ contains a small list of taboo words, see the README file
for more info.  The speller/ directory contains scripts for creating
spelling dictionaries for Aspell and Hunspell.

The other directories contain the necessary information to recreate the
word lists from the raw data.  Unless you are interested in improving the
words lists you should not need to worry about what's here.  See the
section on recreating the words lists for more information on what's
there.

Except for the special word lists the files follow the following
naming convention:
  <spelling category>-<sub-category>.<size>
Where the spelling category is one of
  english, american, british, british_z, canadian, australian
  variant_1, variant_2, variant_3,
  british_variant_1, british_variant_2, 
  canadian_variant_1, canadian_variant_2,
  australian_variant_1, australian_variant_2
Sub-category is one of
  abbreviations, contractions, proper-names, upper, words
And size is one of
  10, 20, 35 (small), 40, 50 (medium), 55, 60, 70 (large), 
  80 (huge), 95 (insane)
The special word lists follow are in the following format:
  special-<description>.<size>
Where description is one of:
  roman-numerals, hacker

The perl script "mk-list" can be used to create a word list of the
desired size, its usage is:
  ./mk-list [-f] [-v#] <spelling categories> <size>
where <spelling categories> is one of the above spelling categories
(the english and special categories are automatically included as well
as all sub-categories) and <size> is the desired size.  The
"-v" option can be used to also include the appropriate
variants file up to level '#'.  The normal output will be a sorted
word list.  If you rather see what files will be included, use the
"-f" option.

When manually combining the words lists the "english" spelling
category should be used as well as one of "american", "british",
"british_z" (british with ize spelling), "canadian" or "australian".
Great care has been taken so that only one spelling for any particular
word is included in the main list (with some minor exceptions).  When
two variants were considered equal I randomly picked one for inclusion
in the main word list.  Unfortunately this means that my choice in how
to spell a word may not match your choice.  If this is the case you
can try including one of the "variant_1" spelling categories which
includes most variants which are considered almost equal.  The
"variant_1" spelling category corresponds mostly to American variants,
while the "british_variant_1", "canadian_variant_1" and
"australian_variant_1" are for British, Canadian and Australian
variants, respectively.  The "variant_2" spelling categories include
variants which are also generally considered acceptable, and
"variant_3" contains variants which are seldom used and may not even
be considered correct.  There is no "british_variant_3",
"canadian_variant_3" or "australian_variant_3" spelling category since
the distinction would be almost meaningless.

The "abbreviation" category includes abbreviations and acronyms which
are not also normal words. The "contractions" category should be self
explanatory. The "upper" category includes upper case words and proper
names which are common enough to appear in a typical dictionary. The
"proper-names" category includes all the additional uppercase words.
Finally the "words" category contains all the normal English words.

To give you an idea of what the words in the various sizes look like
here is a sample of 25 random words found only in that size:

@`src/rand-samples | iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8`

And here is a count on the number of words in each spelling category
(american + english spelling category):

@`src/count`

(The "Words" column does not include the name count.)

Size 35 is the recommended small size, 50 the medium and 70 the large.
Sizes 70 and below contain words found in most dictionaries while the
80 size contains all the strange and unusual words people like to use
in word games such as Scrabble (TM).  While a lot of the words in the
80 size are not used very often, they are all generally considered
valid words in the English language.  The 95 contains just about every
English word in existence and then some.  Many of the words at the 95
level will probably not be considered valid English words by most
people.

For spell checking I recommend using size 60.  This size is the
largest size that I am fairly confident does not contain any
misspellings or invalid words.  In addition an effort is made to
exclude valid yet problematic words (such as "calender") from the 60
size that are likely to be a misspelling of a more common word.  The
70 size is reasonable for those wanting a larger list and don't mind a
few errors.  The 80 or larger sizes are not reasonable for spell
checking.

Accents are present on certain words such as café in iso8859-1 format.

CHANGES:

From Version 2017.01.22 to 2017.08.24

  Various new words.

From Version 2016.11.20 to 2017.01.22

  Various new words.

From Version 2016.06.26 to 2016.11.20

  New Australian spelling category thanks to the work of Benjamin
  Titze (btitze@protonmail.ch)

  Various new words.

From Version 2016.01.19 to 2016.06.26

  Various new words.

  Updated to Version 6.0.2 of 12dicts

  Other minor changes.

From Version 2015.08.24 to 2016.01.19

  Various new words.

  Clarified README to indicate why the 60 size is the preferred size
  for spell checking.

  Remove some very uncommon possessive forms.

  Change "SET UTF8" to "SET UTF-8" in hunspell affix file.

From Version 2015.05.18 to 2015.08.24 (Aug 24, 2015)

  Various new words.

From Version 2015.04.24 to 2015.05.18 (May 18, 2015)

  Added some new words found to have a high frequency in the COCA
  corpus.  (http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/).

  Fix en spelling suggestions for 'alot' and 'exersize' in hunspell
  dictionary (upstreamed from the changes made in Firefox).

From Version 2015.02.15 to 2015.04.24 (April 24, 2015)

  Added some new words.

  Convert hunspell dictionary to UTF-8 in order to handle smart
  quotes correctly.

From Version 2015.01.28 to 2015.02.15 (February 15, 2015)

  Added a large number of neologisms (newly invented words)
  such as "selfie" and "smartwatch" thanks to Alan Beale.

  Various other new words.

  Clean up the special-hacker category by removing some words that
  didn't exist in the Google Book's Corpus (1980 - 2008) and
  originated from the "Unofficial Jargon File Word Lists".

From Version 2014.11.17 to 2015.01.28 (January 28, 2015)

  Various new words, many from analyzing the Google Book's Corpus
  (1980 - 2008).  See http://app.aspell.net/lookup-freq.

  Moved some uncommon words that can easily hide a misspelling of a
  more common word to level 70.  (calender, adrenalin and Joesph)

  Removed several -er and -est forms from adjectives that were so
  uncommon that they were not found anywhere is the Google Book's
  Corpus (1980 - 2008).

From Version 2014.08.11.1 to 2014.11.17 (November 17, 2014)

  Various new words.

  Fix typo in Hunspell readme.

From Version 2014.08.11 to 2014.08.11.1 (August 13, 2014)

  Forgot to mention this important change from 7.1 to 2014.08.11:

    Shifted the variant levels up by one: variant_0 is now variant_1,
    variant_1 is now variant_2, and variant_2 is now variant_3.

  Other minor fixes in this README.

  No changes to the contents of the lists.

From Revision 7.1 to Version 2014.08.11 (August 11, 2014)

  Added some missing possessive forms.

  Added some new words and proper names.

  Clean up the categories (words, upper, proper-names etc) so that they
  are more accurate.

  Convert documentation to UTF-8.  For now, the wordlist are still in
  ISO-8859-1 to prevent compatibility problems.

  Add schema and scripts for creating a SQLite database from SCOWL.
  Add some utility and library functions using them.  This database is
  used by the new web app's (http://app.aspell.net/lookup & create).

  Enhance speller/make-hunspell-dict.  The biggest improvement is that
  it that it now generates several more dictionaries in addition to
  the official ones.  These additional dictionaries are ones for
  British English and larger dictionaries that include up to SCOWL
  size 70.

From Revision 7 to 7.1 (January 6, 2011)

  Updated to revision 5.1 of Varcon which corrected several errors.

  Fixed various problems with the variant processing which corrected a
  few more errors.

  Added several now common proper names and some other words now
  in common use.

  Include misc/ and speller/ directory which were in SVN but left
  out of the release tarball.

  Other minor fixes, including some fixes to the taboo word lists.

From Revision 6 to 7 (December 27, 2010)

  Updated to revision 5.0 of Varcon which corrected many errors,
  especially in the British and Canadian spelling categories.  Also
  added new spelling categories for the British and Canadian spelling
  variants and separated them out from the main variant_* categories.
  
  Moved Moby names lists (3897male.nam 4946fema.len 21986na.mes) to 95
  level since they contain too many errors and rare names.

  Moved frequently class 0 from Brian Kelk's Wordlist from 
  level 60 to 70, and also filter it with level 80 due to, too many
  misspellings.

  Many other minor fixes.

From Revision 5 to 6 (August 10, 2004)

  Updated to version 4.0 of the 12dicts package.

  Included the 3esl, 2of4brif, and 5desk list from the new 12dicts
  package.  The 3esl was included in the 40 size, the 2of4brif in the
  55 size and the 5desk in the 70 size.

  Removed the Ispell word list as it was a source of too many errors.
  This eliminated the 65 size.

  Removed clause 4 from the Ispell copyright with permission of Geoff
  Kuenning.

  Updated to version 4.1 of VarCon.

  Added the "british_z" spelling category which is British using the
  "ize" spelling.

From Revision 4a to 5 (January 3, 2002)

  Added variants that were not really spelling variants (such as
  forwards) back into the main list.

  Fixed a bug which caused variants of words to incorrectly appear in
  the non-variant lists.

  Moved rarely used inflections of a word into higher number lists.

  Added other inflections of a words based on the following criteria
    If the word is in the base form: only include that word.
    If the word is in a plural form: include the base word and the plural
    If the word is a verb form (other than plural):  include all verb forms
    If the word is an ad* form: include all ad* forms
    If the word is in a possessive form: also include the non-possessive

  Updated to the latest version of many of the source dictionaries.

  Removed the DEC Word List due to the questionable licence and
  because removing it will not seriously decrease the quality of SCOWL
  (there are a few less proper names).  

From Revision 4 to 4a (April 4, 2001)

  Reran the scripts on a never version of AGID (3a) which fixes a bug
  which caused some common words to be improperly marked as variants.

From Revision 3 to 4 (January 28, 2001)

  Split the variant "spelling category" up into 3 different levels.
  
  Added words in the Ispell word list at the 65 level.

  Other changes due to using more recent versions of various sources
  included a more accurate version of AGID thanks to the work of
  Alan Beale

From Revision 2 to 3 (August 18, 2000)

  Renamed special-unix-terms to special-hacker and added a large
  number of commonly used words within the hacker (not cracker)
  community.

  Added a couple more signature words including "newbie".

  Minor changes due to changes in the inflection database.

From Revision 1 to 2 (August 5, 2000)

  Moved the male and female name lists from the mwords package and the
  DEC name lists form the 50 level to the 60 level and moved Alan's
  name list from the 60 level to the 50 level.  Also added the top
  1000 male, female, and last names from the 1990 Census report to the
  50 level.  This reduced the number of names in the 50 level from
  17,000 to 7,000.

  Added a large number of Uppercase words to the 50 level.

  Properly accented the possessive form of some words.

  Minor other changes due to changes in my raw data files which have
  not been released yet.  Email if you are interested in these files.

COPYRIGHT, SOURCES, and CREDITS:

@`cat Copyright`

The variant word lists were created from a list of variants found in
the 12dicts supplement package as well as a list of variants I created
myself.

The Readmes for the various packages used can be found in the
appropriate directory under the r/ directory.

FUTURE PLANS:

The process of "sort"s, "comm"s, and Perl scripts to combine the many
word lists and separate out the variant information is inexact and
error prone.  The whole things needs to be rewritten to deal with
words in terms of lemmas.  When the exact lemma is not known a best
guess should be made.  I'm not sure what form this should be in.  I
originally thought this should be some sort of database, but maybe I
should just slurp all that data into memory and process it in one
giant perl script.  With the amount of memory available these days (at
least 2 GB, often 4 GB or more) this should not really be a problem.

In addition, there is a very nice frequency analyze of the BNC corpus
done by Adam Kilgarriff.  Unlike Brian's word lists the BNC lists
include part of speech information.  I plan on somehow using these
lists as Adam Kilgarriff has given me the OK to use it in SCOWL.
These lists will greatly reduce the problem of inflected forms of a
word appearing at different levels due to the part-of-speech
information.

There is frequency information for some other corpus such as COCA
(Corpus of Contemporary American English) and ANS (American National
Corpus) which I might also be able to use.  The former will require
permission, and the latter is of questionable quality.

RECREATING THE WORD LISTS:

In order to recreate the word lists you need a modern version of Perl,
bash, the traditional set of shell utilities, a system that supports
symbolic links, and quite possibly GNU Make.  The easiest way to
recreate the word lists is to checkout the corresponding Git version
(see the version string at the start of the file) and simply type
"make" (see http://wordlist.aspell.net).  You can try to download all
the pieces manually, but this method is not no longer tested nor
supported.

The src/ directory contains the numerous scripts used in the creation
of the final product. 

The r/ directory contains the raw data used to create the final
product.  If you checkout from Git this directory should be populated
automatically for you.  If you insist on doing it the hard way see the
README file in the r/ directory for more information.

The l/ directory contains symbolic links used by the actual scripts.

Finally, the working/ directory is where all the intermittent files go
that are not specific to one source.