I need a large list of German words suitable for validating entries in
a Scrabble-like word puzzle game (i.e. words that you'd find in a
dictionary).

The word list must be large (>80,000 words), comprehensive, and
reasonably free of slang and proper names (which won't be valid in the
game).  It should include plurals and the various conjugated forms of
verbs - i.e. any word you could legally play in Scrabble or a similar
style game.

Most importantly, the word list must be public domain, open source, or
available under some sort of license that makes it suitable for use in
my game (and there must be a clear license/statement to that effect,
on a reasonable, non-warez site).

The list can be in any reasonable text format - if I can cut and paste
it into Windows Notepad, that's all I need.

I do not speak German well, but I will have a German speaking
acquaintenance verify that it looks reasonable.

(Note that I've posted this question 3 times - once each for Spanish,
German, and French - feel free to answer for each language for a
bigger payment.)

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Request for Question Clarification by leapinglizard-ga on 28 Jun 2005 15:55 PDT

The TU Chemnitz dictionary is available for download under Version 2
of the GNU General License. Is this license acceptable to you?

http://dict.tu-chemnitz.de/help.html#download

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

The dictionary file as it is requires some processing to strip out the
English translations and to extract all inflections, but I can do this
for you with my own text-processing tools. The end result would be an
alphabetic list of words, one per line, which I would post on a web
page for you. Good enough?

leapinglizard

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Clarification of Question by psteinx-ga on 28 Jun 2005 17:02 PDT

The dictionary itself is ok (missing some verb conjugations, but I
think I can generate some of them automatically and/or fill in by
hand).  However, it's under the general GPL rather than the library
GPL.  The former requires me to release all my source code, whereas
the latter would only require me to open source the dictionary and/or
my modifications to it.  I've asked the library provider if LGPL would
be acceptable - if he says yes, then the answer is complete (I don't
need text parsing- I can do that myself).  If he won't consent to
LGPL, then I don't think I can use this.  I'll let you know.

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Request for Question Clarification by leapinglizard-ga on 30 Jun 2005 15:01 PDT

The following is a fairly comprehensive word list.

ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/wordlists/german/words.german.Z

An accompanying README mentions that the file came from Munich.

ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/wordlists/README

Based on the number of entries in this word list, I believe it was
copied to the Munich FTP repository from Erlangen. The Erlangen file
is cited here.

http://ftp.fi.muni.cz/pub/tex/local/spelling/README.german

Erlangen is also listed on this page devoted to "Free Electronic
Dictionaries". See under the heading "Where to find dictionaries
today".

http://runeberg.org/admin/dictionary.html

Although I have no firm proof that this word list is in the public
domain, I have detected no sign that is covered by a restrictive
license. All indications are to the contrary. All in all, I would have
no qualms about using it in a proprietary program.

What do you think?

leapinglizard

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Clarification of Question by psteinx-ga on 30 Jun 2005 20:54 PDT

OK, I ended up going the route suggested by electropostie-ga of
merging multiple dictionaries (and only using words that appear on two
independent dictionaries).  I didn't use all the dictionaries in E's
list - just those that appeared to be public domain, open-source
and/or academic in origin (i.e. not commercial, and not from someone
else's game).

So, electropostie-ga - If you repost your comment as an answer, I'll approve it.

LeapingLizard - the Chemnitz dictionary wasn't a final answer for me,
as it had various issues, but it was helpful and put me on the right
scent.  If you send me appropriate info (physical address and/or
paypal account), I'll gladly send you half the list price, if you
think that's fair.

Phil

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Request for Question Clarification by leapinglizard-ga on 30 Jun 2005 22:04 PDT

We are not permitted to exchange contact information through this
service. You can, however, change the list price of your question
before an answer is posted. See here under "Change your question
price".

http://answers.google.com/answers/help.html#followup

By the way, the commenter below is not a Researcher and cannot receive
payment for his comment.

leapinglizard

---

Clarification of Question by psteinx-ga on 01 Jul 2005 07:39 PDT

OK - would you be cool if I dropped the price to $30, you submitted
your response as an answer, and I accepted?

---

Request for Question Clarification by leapinglizard-ga on 01 Jul 2005 08:10 PDT

Sure, that would be an equitable solution.

leapinglizard

Thank you for accepting my earlier work as an answer, more or less.
Below is a duplicate of the text.


The following is a fairly comprehensive word list.

ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/wordlists/german/words.german.Z

An accompanying README mentions that the file came from Munich.

ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/wordlists/README

Based on the number of entries in this word list, I believe it was
copied to the Munich FTP repository from Erlangen. The Erlangen file
is cited here.

http://ftp.fi.muni.cz/pub/tex/local/spelling/README.german

Erlangen is also listed on this page devoted to "Free Electronic
Dictionaries". See under the heading "Where to find dictionaries
today".

http://runeberg.org/admin/dictionary.html

Although I have no firm proof that this word list is in the public
domain, I have detected no sign that is covered by a restrictive
license. All indications are to the contrary. All in all, I would have
no qualms about using it in a proprietary program.


leapinglizard

Here are some pointers; you may find a wordlist in here that is suitable
for you.  More likely you can create a new work that you have the
rights to by using these as source material to build your own word
list, for instance by using words that appear in two or more 
independant sources.  Or if you have a word list with an acceptable
licence, you can eliminate invalid words from that list using a
spelling checker which has a more restrictive licence.

If you can't find a clear-cut legally acceptable word list, you might find
it worthwhile to do a little research on "Feist v. Rural Telephone"
and copyright issues on lists of facts.  The US position on copyright
of wordlists is quite different from that of most European countries.
Of course if you are selling your game in Germany you need to consult
a German lawyer.

( I'm new to Google Answers and I don't know if this constitutes a
full answer or not, but I couldn't find a way on the web page to
post an answer - only a comment.  I guess I need to go find the
FAQ - maybe I can post a Google Answers question about it ;-)  )

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Here is a list of words played in an online word game
which were challenged and which have been recorded as
valid or not valid:

http://www.baweibel.com/cgi/wortliste.pl

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http://scrabbleschoten.homestead.com/files/Duitse_Woordenlijst.zip
from http://scrabbleschoten.homestead.com/wordlists.html

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http://www.pa-linz.ac.at/studiengaenge/zusatzstudien/cis/otto/Beschreibungen/702.htm
Get file "lexicon.dll" from the program (it's text, despite the name).
The file is a list of common words suitable for learners of German as
a foreign language, plus meanings.

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BOMP (http://www.ikp.uni-bonn.de/dt/forsch/phonetik/bomp/README.html)
is a phonetic dictionary but includes the proper spellings as
well as the phonetics and has been extensively checked.

You may need to negotiate licence terms with the owner.

-------------------------------------------------------

There is an anagram generator at
http://www.sibiller.de/anagramme/anagramme.html
which uses this word list:
http://www.sibiller.de/anagramme/cgi-bin/wl.cgi

It is no longer available for online download (it used to be) but
you can probably get it by mailing the author (see the second
URL above)
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There is a multilingual scrabble game at:
http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/scrabbit/index.html
which contains a german word list.

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Have a look at German.Stemmer at
http://crl.nmsu.edu/cgi-bin/Tools/CLR/clrcat#D6

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Of course there is always ispell...

http://fmg-www.cs.ucla.edu/geoff/ispell-dictionaries.html#German-dicts

and what looks like a better ispell German wordlist here:

ftp://ftp.tue.nl/pub/tex/GB95/ispell-deutsch2/

- you'll have to rebuild plain ascii from the ispell wordlists;
it's not hard.
-------------------------------------------------------

If you can unpack Macintosh files, there's a spelling checker
called Excalibur with original word lists:

ftp://ftp.eg.bucknell.edu/pub/mac/Excalibur-dictionaries/

"The German dictionary now has two parts.  "Deutsches Lexikon" is a
traditional German dictionary.  "Neues Deutsches Lexikon" is a
dictionary that contains words which have a new spelling as of August
1, 1998.  Since the old spelling will probably be used for some time,
you should use both dictionaries together.  See <http://www.duden.de/>
for more information."
-------------------------------------------------------

There are also the venerable Oxford word lists (nothing to do with
the OED.  These came from a project at Oxford University)

ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/wordlists/german/

-------------------------------------------------------

There are more links to be explored here:

http://www.watzmann.net/scg/faq-8.html

-------------------------------------------------------

There's a program "Hangman Deluxe" which copntains a german
word list 'german.hwl'.

://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&biw=1003&q=%22hangman+deluxe%22

-------------------------------------------------------

There are several word lists here:

http://www.pics-software.de/swraets.htm#download

This is from a scrabble-help program and has descriptions of
the words.  need to extract from the .db file but not too hard.
There's half a piece of code to do this in fact in the src/
subdirectory. The raw word list is also easily extracted from
one of the files but it isn't a very good wordlist - too many
proper nouns.  There are three lists here, 4000, 13000 & 43000 words -
may be usable to create multiple skill levels.  There *may* be
some sort of skill level tag in the database but I haven't
found it yet.

------------------------------------------------------

OK - would you be cool if I dropped the price to $30, you submitted
your response as an answer, and I accepted?