I need a large list of French 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 French, but I will have a French 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 rainbow-ga on 28 Jun 2005 14:03 PDT

Hi psteinx,

Would these lists suit your purpose?

http://ashelf.com/wordlists/z/zfr/www/

Source: aShelf
http://ashelf.com/

Best regards,
Rainbow

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Clarification of Question by psteinx-ga on 28 Jun 2005 14:28 PDT

The list itself looks good upon casual inspection - it's certainly large enough.

Unfortunately, there is no licensing information or anything about
where the list came from.  I've sent an e-mail to the owner of the
site to ask for clarification.

If this leads to a clear, useable license, I'll have a French speaker
check the list slightly more thoroughly (though it looks solid to me),
and then yes, it will be acceptable.

---

Request for Question Clarification by rainbow-ga on 28 Jun 2005 14:30 PDT

Thank you for your clarification. 

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes,
Rainbow

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Clarification of Question by psteinx-ga on 30 Jun 2005 09:10 PDT

I received a response back from the e-mail address listed on the site
>>
Hmmm... that dates back to when I still owned onelook.com and they still
have a link to it (see studytech.com). They still have a link to it.

I do not own it.  As I recall it is a list of French words approved by the
French government for use in their language.
At this point, I am not certain of the url where I got it but if you want
I will try to track it down. You might try a google.com search for several
words in the list.  But I think it was not in a simple web page format so
that may not work.
<<
I've asked him to locate the URL (he may or may not help), but if he's
right and it originated with the French government, someone here who
speaks French could probably find it, along with some sort of
statement about usage that would allow me to use it.  If I get a valid
response here before I get anything from the e-mail sender, I'll pay
the bounty here.  If the respondent is other than rainbow-ga, I'll
also paypal Rainbow a secondary bonus for putting us onto the right
track.

---

Clarification of Question by psteinx-ga on 01 Jul 2005 11:01 PDT

OK, so I deem the question answered, but somebody needs to submit it as an answer.

Hi psteinx,

I'm glad the site I found was what you were looking for. 

Although, commenter fairesavoir-ga assisted in this question, only a
Researcher can officially submit an answer.

Thank you fairesavoir for your help.

Best regards,
Rainbow

Good answer.

If this is for a Scrabble clone, you won't find an unambiguously
licenced word list that is 'correct' because by definition the
official word list is ODS.  What you will find are several files which
attempt to approximate to ODS and which were probably created by
scanning the dictionary.  (The errors I've seen reflect scan-errors
rather than typos).  If you want a legal clone of the official
dictionary, you would need to employ at least two typists to each
re-key it manually and then compare the results and correct
discrepancies between the two copies.  This is how the problem has
been approached before for a commercial scrabble clone in order to
avoid a lawsuit.

I can point you at dozens of French (and Spanish) word lists (similar
to my answer to your German question) but it's not obvious that *any*
of them will fulfil your licence requirements.  Good quality and
public domain generally do not go hand in hand in the word list world.

meanwhile here's a sample link...  http://www.nongnu.org/eliot/

It's not a Scrabble clone - I used Scrabble as an example as it's
something most people are familiar with.  The game mechanics are
actually closer to Bookworm (a more obscure game) - you're finding
words within a random jumble of letters.  I need the dictionary to
validate the words you find.  It doesn't have to be a dead ringer for
whatever's in the official Scrabble dictionary - just a reasonable
list of words that won't upset players who find common words missing.

For that matter, I find the official Scrabble dictionary (in English)
a bit underwhelming - it doesn't include a lot of words that I think
it should - words that started as slang or proper nouns but have been
used so much and for so long that I think it's fair to call them part
of standard English now.

Also, I don't think it's unrealistic to find a high quality, open
source word list that isn't just a pirate job.  For English, I'm using
ENABLE (google for it), which is quite good.  There's a lot of
dictionaries out there, and various projects (Project Gutenberg,
academic projects, government projects), that do this kind of thing
and put their results into the public domain.  Even a very old
dictionary (pre 1923 and out of copyright) would be a good starting
point, if it were updated with more modern words.

Hi psteix-ga,

The origin of the list found by rainbow-ga is from:

ABU: La Dictionnaire Universelle

The home page is: http://abu.cnam.fr/

The parts of the site to look at first are:

= = = = 

Listes de mots: http://abu.cnam.fr/DICO/ 

?La vertu des listes de mots que vous trouverez dans ces pages n'est
pas d'offrir aux bibliophiles que vous êtes la possibilité de
développer des outils professionnels. Elles sont en effet loin d'être
complètes et sans erreur.?

The last sentence above says that this is far from being complete and
(far from being ?) without errors.

Comprises 4 lists, the one you are looking for has 300,000+ common
French words and declined verbs:
http://abu.cnam.fr/DICO/mots-communs.html

DOWNLOADING

Under ?COPIER? there should be a compressed file 10MB in size but it
comes up Page Not Found.

Under COPIER AU FORMAT NON-COMPRESSE you down load each letter of the
alphabet along with the License. The total file is 10447 MB if I added
correctly.

= = = 

And the License, terms and conditions: http://abu.cnam.fr/cgi-bin/donner_licence

Inspite of my "fairesavoir-ga" handle, I am not francophone and my
French has deteriorated in the past four decades since I left France
as a teenager. So I am not able to give an expert opinion on the above
License.

= = =

Caution: The list found at www.iro.umontreal.ca/~lapalme/
Programmes/Java/les8lettres
Is not the same list as above.


Search Term: a à abaca abacule abaissa abaissable

If you can't find anyone to translate the License, I will give it a try.
I'll keep checking this thread from time to time.
Best wishes and best of luck.