1 Unofficial Alternate 12Dicts package (Alt12Dicts)
3 Packaged by Kevin Atkinson
7 The files contained in this archive are the result of a rather
8 extensive conversation between me (Kevin Atkinson) and Alan Beale, the
9 author of the 12Dicts package. I can be contacted at kevina@gnu.org
10 and Alan Beale can be contacted at biljir@pobox.com. This archive
11 contains almost all the information in the official 12Dicts package
12 but in a different format as well as a good deal of additional
13 information. However it is not meant as a replacement for the
14 official 12Dicts package. It simply offers the information in a
17 This package corresponds to Version 4.0 of the official 12Dicts package.
19 The latest version of this package and the official 12Dicts package can
20 be found at http://wordlist.aspell.net/
22 The file README-orig contains the original Readme file distributed
23 with the official 12Dicts package. README-infl contains the Readme
24 file for 2of12infl.txt and finally README-agid contains the Readme for
25 AGID which 2of12infl.txt is based on.
27 All of these files have been explicitly placed in the Public Domain by
31 2of12full.txt description:
33 The file 2of12full.txt contains the all words appearing in more than
34 than one of Alan Beale's source dictionaries. Each line contains four
35 numbers, being the total number of dictionaries, the non-variant
36 entries, the variant entries, and the non-American entries. Counts of
37 zero are replaced by hyphens. For instance, the entry
41 indicates that the word "aeroplane" is listed in 7 of the dictionaries.
42 None list it as a primary American word, 2 list it as a variant form,
43 and 5 list it as a non-American word. Note that words may be marked
44 with a "&" for either of 2 reasons. They may represent a non-American
45 spelling of an American word, such as "aeroplane" or "gaol", or they
46 may represent a word not normally used in American English, such as
49 Words marked with a colon (":") after it are abbrivations which are
50 entirely lower-case and alphabetic.
52 This file contains almost all the information found in the normal
53 12Dicts package except for the marking of "second class", the
54 inclusion of "signature words" which did not appear in at least two
55 dictionaries. A second class word is a word that that an inflection
56 which was defined in the same entry as the base word, is a derived
57 word (-ly, -ness or -er/or) which was not defined in a separate entry,
58 or appeared in a list of undefined words with a common prefix, such as
62 signature.txt description:
64 The file signature.txt contains a list of signature words. Signature
65 words are words are words which failed are not in at least 6
66 dictionaries but Alan Beale thought should be included at the 6of12
67 level (see README-orig). Examples of some of the sorts of words are
70 1. Words of the same category as other included words. An example is
71 the astrological sign "Cancer", which alone of all the astro-
72 logical signs fails to appear in 6 or more of the dictionaries.
73 Similarly added were the omitted holidays "Thanksgiving" and
75 2. Vulgarities, sexual terms and insults. Some such words were
76 already included, but most of the source dictionaries were quite
77 squeamish about them. These words are very widely known indeed;
78 I hold that any list of "common" words which does not include the
79 infamous f-word is simply discredited thereby. Some may feel that
80 it would have been better to leave some or all of these terms
81 unmentioned. Nevertheless, the expression of blasphemy,
82 unwarranted contempt, and perverse lust, whether in words or in
83 deeds, is a very human trait. Suppressing the evidence of these
84 aspects of the human condition in our language makes no more sense
85 than excluding "leprosy", "gangrene" and "dementia", no matter how
86 unpleasant they may be to contemplate.
87 3. Conventional conversational phrases so common as to be practically
88 invisible to native speakers. Examples are "thank you", "good
89 night", "uh-huh", "of course" and "gesundheit".
90 4. Sports terminology, especially for football and baseball.
93 signature2.txt description:
95 The file signature2.txt contains inflections of irregular verbs not
96 explicitly mentioned in 2 source dictionaries, such as "outfought" and
100 variants.txt description:
102 The variants.txt file contains a subset of the words appearing in at
103 least one of the 12 source dictionaries marked as variants or
104 non-American. This list contains only the words which are spelling
105 variants, words which represent different ways of saying the same
106 thing (such as "henceforward" as a variant of "henceforth") and
107 non-American words without a similar American form (such as "telly")
108 have been removed. Each entry is followed by a tab, and a notation
109 indicating which of several classes the word falls into. To describe
110 the classes, it is best to do a little algebra. Let NV be the total
111 number of non-variants, A the number of American variants, B the
112 number of non-American variants, and V=A+B. Then the following
113 annotations are to be interpreted as follows:
119 #? - A >= B, 0.65*NV < V <= NV
120 &? - A < B, 0.65*NV < V <= NV
122 Simplifying, the choice between # and & indicates which variety of
123 variant dominates, while ! and ? indicate a stronger or weaker than
124 average agreement on variance.
126 Additional notes on the list from Alan:
128 I should note a couple other characteristics of this file. First of
129 all, there are cases where spellings exist which are clearly
130 variants of one another, but where this is not recognized by the
131 source dictionaries. An example is the pair "levelheaded" and
132 "level-headed". These are clearly the same word, but none of my
133 sources lists both of them. I have chosen not to go beyond the
134 source dictionaries and put such words on the variants list, even in
135 obvious cases like this one.
137 I should also note that there are cases where the question of
138 whether 2 words are spelling variants or actually different words is
139 not easy to answer. For instance, consider the pairs
140 "lengthways"/"lengthwise" or "toward"/"towards". I've simply made
141 whatever decision seemed best to me in cases like this ("lengthways"
142 is a variant, "towards" is not), but recognize that any other
143 observer (who could bring himself to care) would be likely to
144 occasionally disagree.
147 abbr.txt description:
149 This file contains (almost) all the abbreviations and acronyms from
150 the 12Dicts sources. Abbreviations which also in a list of common
151 personal names (of about the same completeness as the ESL dictionaries)
152 are marked with a tilda ("~") after it. There are still likely to be
153 some abbreviations not marked with a tilda that match less common
156 Additional notes from Alan:
158 For words containing upper-case, I [Alan Beale] had not recorded
159 whether a word was an abbreviation, so I was forced to remove the
160 non-abbreviations from the list by hand. Because of the need to
161 remove non-abbreviations, I limited myself to consideration of
162 upper-case words of 6 or fewer characters. It is possible that a
163 small number of acronyms or abbreviations longer than 6 characters
164 might have been missed.
167 variant-notes.txt description:
169 The file variant-notes.txt contains some additional notes on
170 questionable variants sent to me when I pointed out that nought was
171 not marked as a variant.
174 2of12id.txt description:
179 2of4brif.txt, 3esl.txt, and 5desk.txt description:
181 These files are identical to the orignal files in the 12Dicts package.
182 See README-orig for more info.