where can I obtain the most extensive "common english words" list that
are in ascii file format and read by a computer. They do not have to
be free. eg a disctionary without the definitions. Has to be greater
than 45,000 words

Hi, 

Here you go, this one has 56k+ in it

http://www.lucidmatrix.com/uploads/word_out.txt

That one is a compliling of several books, taking out dups and making a list. 

There is also a page of word lists here :

http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/


Thanks,

webadept-ga

---

Clarification of Answer by webadept-ga on 30 Aug 2002 20:05 PDT

Hi again, 

If you need a 100k file I can probably make one for you. I figured
that the link site at the wordlist project at sourceforge was far more
than you would ever need, and the 56k file was just something I had.

The way I made the 56k file was from a project I'm working on
(personal project) which is creating vocabulary lists and thesaurus
lists from authors. Shakespeare, Milton and Twain are in that file.
The tool I have right now, downloads the complete works of those three
from an open source project and extracts the vocabulary of words with
3 characters or more. But building a greater list shouldn't be much of
a problem. I would just download a few more books from different
authors and run the de-dup program on the vocabularies.

The thing that threw me in your question the most was "common english
words" and the 45k expectation. "common english words" only equal
about 8-10k of words. Even for well spoken people. Shakespeare had
over 15k (though my count came closer to 19k but this includes names
and places)in his works, but that's really high.

But if you want 100k, I can probably get really close to that, perhaps
even over, but they are not going to be "common english words".

Thanks,

webadept-ga

This answers my question, mostly - but this is not the most extensive
on the net, I expected the Grady Wards Moby to be the "most extensive"
- http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research/ilash/Moby/  Linux gives away
free a 45K word list, Wintergreen will sell you a 100K word list for
$500

You might also want to check out the link below.  The last four zip
files on the page contain a word list of about 100,000 words:

http://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/spell.html

According to http://www.lucidmatrix.com/uploads/word_out.txt,
"abbominable" is a common English word, yet it's not in any
dictionaries I've checked. Did you include the list simply because
it's yours, Webadept? What excatly have you done to ensure that the
list does not contain mispellings?

BTW, Webadept, speaking of misspellings, you might want to correct the
several omissions of apostrophes from the contraction "it's" on your
front page.