1 Unofficial Alternate 12Dicts package (Alt12Dicts)
3 Packaged by Kevin Atkinson
8 The files contained in this archive are the result of a rather
9 extensive conversation between me (Kevin Atkinson) and Alan Beale, the
10 author of the 12Dicts package. I can be contacted at kevina@gnu.org
11 and Alan Beale can be contacted at biljir@pobox.com. This archive
12 contains almost all the information in the official 12Dicts package
13 but in a different format as well as a good deal of additional
14 information. However it is not meant as a replacement for the
15 official 12Dicts package. It simply offers the information in a
18 This package corresponds to Version 4.0 of the official 12Dicts package.
20 The latest version of this package and the official 12Dicts package can
21 be found at http://aspell.sourceforge.net/wl/.
23 The file README-orig contains the original Readme file distributed
24 with the official 12Dicts package. README-infl contains the Readme
25 file for 2of12infl.txt and finally README-agid contains the Readme for
26 AGID which 2of12infl.txt is based on.
28 All of these files have been explicitly placed in the Public Domain by
32 2of12full.txt description:
34 The file 2of12full.txt contains the all words appearing in more than
35 than one of Alan Beale's source dictionaries. Each line contains four
36 numbers, being the total number of dictionaries, the non-variant
37 entries, the variant entries, and the non-American entries. Counts of
38 zero are replaced by hyphens. For instance, the entry
42 indicates that the word "aeroplane" is listed in 7 of the dictionaries.
43 None list it as a primary American word, 2 list it as a variant form,
44 and 5 list it as a non-American word. Note that words may be marked
45 with a "&" for either of 2 reasons. They may represent a non-American
46 spelling of an American word, such as "aeroplane" or "gaol", or they
47 may represent a word not normally used in American English, such as
50 Words marked with a colon (":") after it are abbrivations which are
51 entirely lower-case and alphabetic.
53 This file contains almost all the information found in the normal
54 12Dicts package except for the marking of "second class", the
55 inclusion of "signature words" which did not appear in at least two
56 dictionaries. A second class word is a word that that an inflection
57 which was defined in the same entry as the base word, is a derived
58 word (-ly, -ness or -er/or) which was not defined in a separate entry,
59 or appeared in a list of undefined words with a common prefix, such as
63 signature.txt description:
65 The file signature.txt contains a list of signature words. Signature
66 words are words are words which failed are not in at least 6
67 dictionaries but Alan Beale thought should be included at the 6of12
68 level (see README-orig). Examples of some of the sorts of words are
71 1. Words of the same category as other included words. An example is
72 the astrological sign "Cancer", which alone of all the astro-
73 logical signs fails to appear in 6 or more of the dictionaries.
74 Similarly added were the omitted holidays "Thanksgiving" and
76 2. Vulgarities, sexual terms and insults. Some such words were
77 already included, but most of the source dictionaries were quite
78 squeamish about them. These words are very widely known indeed;
79 I hold that any list of "common" words which does not include the
80 infamous f-word is simply discredited thereby. Some may feel that
81 it would have been better to leave some or all of these terms
82 unmentioned. Nevertheless, the expression of blasphemy,
83 unwarranted contempt, and perverse lust, whether in words or in
84 deeds, is a very human trait. Suppressing the evidence of these
85 aspects of the human condition in our language makes no more sense
86 than excluding "leprosy", "gangrene" and "dementia", no matter how
87 unpleasant they may be to contemplate.
88 3. Conventional conversational phrases so common as to be practically
89 invisible to native speakers. Examples are "thank you", "good
90 night", "uh-huh", "of course" and "gesundheit".
91 4. Sports terminology, especially for football and baseball.
94 signature2.txt description:
96 The file signature2.txt contains inflections of irregular verbs not
97 explicitly mentioned in 2 source dictionaries, such as "outfought" and
101 variants.txt description:
103 The variants.txt file contains a subset of the words appearing in at
104 least one of the 12 source dictionaries marked as variants or
105 non-American. This list contains only the words which are spelling
106 variants, words which represent different ways of saying the same
107 thing (such as "henceforward" as a variant of "henceforth") and
108 non-American words without a similar American form (such as "telly")
109 have been removed. Each entry is followed by a tab, and a notation
110 indicating which of several classes the word falls into. To describe
111 the classes, it is best to do a little algebra. Let NV be the total
112 number of non-variants, A the number of American variants, B the
113 number of non-American variants, and V=A+B. Then the following
114 annotations are to be interpreted as follows:
120 #? - A >= B, 0.65*NV < V <= NV
121 &? - A < B, 0.65*NV < V <= NV
123 Simplifying, the choice between # and & indicates which variety of
124 variant dominates, while ! and ? indicate a stronger or weaker than
125 average agreement on variance.
127 Additional notes on the list from Alan:
129 I should note a couple other characteristics of this file. First of
130 all, there are cases where spellings exist which are clearly
131 variants of one another, but where this is not recognized by the
132 source dictionaries. An example is the pair "levelheaded" and
133 "level-headed". These are clearly the same word, but none of my
134 sources lists both of them. I have chosen not to go beyond the
135 source dictionaries and put such words on the variants list, even in
136 obvious cases like this one.
138 I should also note that there are cases where the question of
139 whether 2 words are spelling variants or actually different words is
140 not easy to answer. For instance, consider the pairs
141 "lengthways"/"lengthwise" or "toward"/"towards". I've simply made
142 whatever decision seemed best to me in cases like this ("lengthways"
143 is a variant, "towards" is not), but recognize that any other
144 observer (who could bring himself to care) would be likely to
145 occasionally disagree.
148 abbr.txt description:
150 This file contains (almost) all the abbreviations and acronyms from
151 the 12Dicts sources. Abbreviations which also in a list of common
152 personal names (of about the same completeness as the ESL dictionaries)
153 are marked with a tilda ("~") after it. There are still likely to be
154 some abbreviations not marked with a tilda that match less common
157 Additional notes from Alan:
159 For words containing upper-case, I [Alan Beale] had not recorded
160 whether a word was an abbreviation, so I was forced to remove the
161 non-abbreviations from the list by hand. Because of the need to
162 remove non-abbreviations, I limited myself to consideration of
163 upper-case words of 6 or fewer characters. It is possible that a
164 small number of acronyms or abbreviations longer than 6 characters
165 might have been missed.
168 variant-notes.txt description:
170 The file variant-notes.txt contains some additional notes on
171 questionable variants sent to me when I pointed out that nought was
172 not marked as a variant.
175 2of12full.txt description:
180 2of4brif.txt, 3esl.txt, and 5desk.txt description:
182 These files are identical to the orignal files in the 12Dicts package.
183 See README-orig for more info.