Unofficial Alternate 12Dicts package (Alt12Dicts) Files by Alan Beale Packaged by Kevin Atkinson Version 2016.06.26 The files contained in this archive are the result of a rather extensive conversation between me (Kevin Atkinson) and Alan Beale, the author of the 12Dicts package. I can be contacted at kevina@gnu.org and Alan Beale can be contacted at biljir@pobox.com. This archive contains almost all the information originally found in release 4 of the official 12Dicts package but in a different format as well as a good deal of additional information. This version has been updated with information from version 6.0.2 of the official 12Dicts package, Version 5 and 6 of 12Dicts include a number of new files not found in version 4; this package does not include those yet. The latest version of this package and the official 12Dicts package can be found at http://wordlist.aspell.net/ The file README-orig contains the original Readme file distributed with the official 12Dicts package. README-infl contains the Readme file for 2of12infl.txt and finally README-agid contains the Readme for AGID which 2of12infl.txt is based on. All of these files have been explicitly placed in the Public Domain by Alan Beale. 2of12full.txt description: The file 2of12full.txt contains the all words appearing in more than than one of Alan Beale's source dictionaries. Each line contains five numbers, being the total number of dictionaries, the non-variant entries, the variant entries, the non-American entries and the "second-class" entries (appearances without a separate definition). Counts of zero are replaced by hyphens. For instance, the entry 7: - 2# 5& -= aeroplane indicates that the word "aeroplane" is listed in 7 of the dictionaries. None list it as a primary American word, 2 list it as a variant form, and 5 list it as a non-American word, and none list it as a second-class word. Note that words may be marked with a "&" for either of 2 reasons. They may represent a non-American spelling of an American word, such as "aeroplane" or "gaol", or they may represent a word not normally used in American English, such as "bloke" or "lorry". Also note that there are two main kinds of second-class words - ones listed in the entry for another word without definition (usually associated with the suffixes -ly, -ness or -er/or), and ones appearing in a list of undefined words with a common prefix. Finally, observe that the numbers of non-variant, variant and non-American entries will sum to the total dictionary count, while the scond-class entry count is independent of them, except that of course it is never greater than the total count. Words marked with a colon (":") after it are abbrevations which are entirely lower-case and alphabetic. This file contains almost all the information found in the normal 12Dicts with two exceptions: 1) "Signature words" which did not appear in at least two dictionaries are not included in 2of12full 2) The sources used differ in one respect from those for the 2of12 and 6of12 files. See README-infl for a full description. signature.txt description: The file signature.txt contains a list of signature words. Signature words are words are words which failed are not in at least 6 dictionaries but Alan Beale thought should be included at the 6of12 level (see README-orig). Examples of some of the sorts of words are included are: 1. Words of the same category as other included words. An example is the astrological sign "Cancer", which alone of all the astro- logical signs fails to appear in 6 or more of the dictionaries. Similarly, the omitted holiday "Christmas Eve" was added. 2. Vulgarities, sexual terms and insults. Some such words were already included, but most of the source dictionaries were quite squeamish about them. These words are very widely known indeed; I hold that any list of "common" words which does not include the infamous f-word is simply discredited thereby. Some may feel that it would have been better to leave some or all of these terms unmentioned. Nevertheless, the expression of blasphemy, unwarranted contempt, and perverse lust, whether in words or in deeds, is a very human trait. Suppressing the evidence of these aspects of the human condition in our language makes no more sense than excluding "leprosy", "gangrene" and "dementia", no matter how unpleasant they may be to contemplate. 3. Conventional conversational phrases so common as to be practically invisible to native speakers. Examples are "thank you", "good night", "uh-huh", "of course" and "gesundheit". 4. Sports terminology, especially for football and baseball. signature2.txt description: The file signature2.txt contains inflections of irregular verbs not explicitly mentioned in 2 source dictionaries, such as "outfought" and "reheard". variants.txt description: The variants.txt file contains a subset of the words appearing in at least one of the 12 source dictionaries marked as variants or non-American. This list contains only the words which are spelling variants, words which represent different ways of saying the same thing (such as "henceforward" as a variant of "henceforth") and non-American words without a similar American form (such as "telly") have been removed. Each entry is followed by a tab, and a notation indicating which of several classes the word falls into. To describe the classes, it is best to do a little algebra. Let NV be the total number of non-variants, A the number of American variants, B the number of non-American variants, and V=A+B. Then the following annotations are to be interpreted as follows: #! - A >= B, NV = 0 &! - A < B, NV = 0 # - A >= B, V > NV & - A < B, V > NV #? - A >= B, 0.65*NV < V <= NV &? - A < B, 0.65*NV < V <= NV Simplifying, the choice between # and & indicates which variety of variant dominates, while ! and ? indicate a stronger or weaker than average agreement on variance. Additional notes on the list from Alan: I should note a couple other characteristics of this file. First of all, there are cases where spellings exist which are clearly variants of one another, but where this is not recognized by the source dictionaries. An example is the pair "levelheaded" and "level-headed". These are clearly the same word, but none of my sources lists both of them. I have chosen not to go beyond the source dictionaries and put such words on the variants list, even in obvious cases like this one. I should also note that there are cases where the question of whether 2 words are spelling variants or actually different words is not easy to answer. For instance, consider the pairs "lengthways"/"lengthwise" or "toward"/"towards". I've simply made whatever decision seemed best to me in cases like this ("lengthways" is a variant, "towards" is not), but recognize that any other observer (who could bring himself to care) would be likely to occasionally disagree. Variants.txt has not been updated for release 6, as critical information about how the list was contructed has unfortunately been lost. abbr.txt description: This file contains (almost) all the abbreviations and acronyms from the 12Dicts sources. Abbreviations which also in a list of common personal names (of about the same completeness as the ESL dictionaries) are marked with a tilda ("~") after it. There are still likely to be some abbreviations not marked with a tilda that match less common names. Additional notes from Alan: For words containing upper-case, I [Alan Beale] had not recorded whether a word was an abbreviation, so I was forced to remove the non-abbreviations from the list by hand. Because of the need to remove non-abbreviations, I limited myself to consideration of upper-case words of 6 or fewer characters. It is possible that a small number of acronyms or abbreviations longer than 6 characters might have been missed. variant-notes.txt description: The file variant-notes.txt contains some additional notes on questionable variants sent to me when I pointed out that nought was not marked as a variant. 2of12id.txt description: See README-infl 2of4brif.txt, 3esl.txt, and 5desk.txt neol2016.txt description: These files are identical to the orignal files in the 12Dicts package. See README-orig for more info. neol2016.poss description: Possessive forms for words in neol2016.txt. (Created by hand by Kevin Atkinson, not provided by Alan). signature3a.txt description: The signature phrases from 3of6all.txt. signature3g.txt description: The signature words from 3of6game.txt. signature4lem.txt description: Extra head words added to 2+2+3lem to add British/American versions of words when only one form was present, plus a few other words added for various reasons. signature4cmn.txt description: Some very common abbreviations, capitalized words and contractions not present in the BYU data, added to 2+2+3cmn.txt. 5d+2a.names2016.txt description: A short list of names of renowned individuals since 1999 (plus one government program and one social media site), added to 5d+2a.txt.