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Hi Peter,
Thank you for this message, as a writer of a spell checker, I have great interest in this subject.
I take it that you want a dictionary that will flag non-US spellings of words (colour vs color, honor vs honour, etc). I see that the english.vdf file has both spellings.
I regret I cannot remember where I got the list of words that make up english.vdf.
Have you considered making your own word list to serve in place of english.vdf. Experts say that the average person only has about 10 to 15 thousand words in his/her vocabulary, so why does one need a spell checker with 100,000+ words. I mean if you never use the word zeugma, your spell checker does not need to know about it either.
It is not as time consuming as one might think. If you look at what we write, most of it consists of words such as:
the pronouns
various tenses of the verbs to be, to do, to have, to go
the question words: what, where, how, etc
words like: to, from, in, out, on, off, if, yes, no, of, with, etc
names of days of week, months, numbers, seasons, colors, etc
Take a look at the attached custom.vdf, it contains most of the these words.
So you start with custom.vdf as your main vdf file, then do the learn new words process on about 10 documents written by you, and you have a totally custom spell checker of "peter-ese" with no word you don't use or want.
I think that is one of the top advantages of Scribe, you can have totally custom dictionaries, you are not locked into anyone else's word list.
Scott
On 7/14/2010 11:46:09 AM, peter rejto wrote:
>I would like to give you a progress
>report on your dictionary versus the
>Hunspell dictionary. That is to say, a
>progress report on english.vdf versus
>en-US.dic
>
>
>In short they are pretty comparable. The
>precise comparison
>of these two ASCII files is beyond my
>programming capabilities.
>
>
>Since Firefox and Thunderbird already
>have en-US.dic in their Dictionaries sub
>directory, I do prefer en-US.dic to
>english.vdf
>
>
>I have also downloaded en-US.dic from
>
>wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictio
>naries
>
>There the readme.txt gives credit to
>Kevin Atkinson. Specifically, to one of
>the versions of his aspell programm, I
>no longer remember which one. The time
>stamp is 2006, so it is more recent than
>the time stamp of your english.vdf,
>which is 1999.
>
>I have a hunch that there are only very
>few public domain dictionaries around.
>So, I also have a hunch that your
>english.vdf also goes back to Kevin
>Atkinson.
>
>
>
>-peter
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