[Lexicog] word list

[Mike Maxwell]

billposer at alum.mit.edu wrote:
> If you're just looking for a large wordlist, one such list
> is the list that is distributed with many GNU/Linux systems,
> usually in /usr/share/dict/words. The older list is only about 45,000
> words, but some systems have a longer list of over 200,000 words.

That will be wordforms (including inflected  forms), won't it, Bill?  So 
nearly every noun will have two forms (or three, if you count 
possessives--but maybe the GNU/Linux apps are smart enough that they 
don't need those).
	
Speaking of the size of word lists, I saw what had to be one of the 
dumbest reasons to make English, rather than French, the main language 
(in some sense, I don't recall what) of the EU: English has more words. 
  I forget the counts--something like 450k for English vs. 200k for 
French.  Unfortunately I don't recall the citation.  I'm guessing that 
they were talking about lexemes, else the many inflected forms of French 
verbs would, I would have thought, have increased the French number.  No 
idea whether they included English particle verbs, or how they drew the 
line between which compound nouns to include and which not to include.

 > Of course another way of obtaining a wordlist is simply to acquire
 > a big chunk of English text (say some combination of internet
 > posts and books from Project Guttenberg) and extract from it a
 > list of the unique words.

Don't forget to include Canterbury Tales if you're doing books, or 
http://houseoffame.blogspot.com/ if you're doing internet posts :-).
-- 
	Mike Maxwell
	maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu


 
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