Eight word lists to help you creating the perfect word game
Yesterday I blogged about the World Play Flash Game Contest, and the word list provided by Dictionary.com.
Suddenly a reader said this word list is not that useful because contains words like “german nazi”, “motherfucker”, and so on.
I’ve just killed a zombie in Resident Evil 5 swearing at his mother, but both me and RE5 are rated 18+ while a flash game should be suitable for everyone.
But the biggest problem is the list does not contain only words… it contains sentences like “german nazi” that could be very difficult to guess.
Samuel Toth helped us cleaning the list and releasing it at this link, but just in case you are looking for another word list I am showing you some useful links:
1 – http://www.scrapingweb.com/databases/words-database.html
A database of over 180,000 English dictionary words available in various formats for sale at $29.95
2 – ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/wordlists/dictionaries (then open Unabr.dict.gz)
A list of 213,557 english words in a text file
3 – http://www.gotnet.biz/Blog/post/English-Words-Database-from-11-Sources.aspx
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Database with english words also available in csv. 320,888 words
4 – http://en-gb.pyxidium.co.uk/dictionary/OOo.php (then open en-GB-wlist.zip)
127,238 english words in a text file
5 – http://www.puzzlers.org/pub/wordlists/enable1.txt
Scrabble dictionary with 172,823 entries
6 – http://www.outpost9.com/files/WordLists.html
Various word lists for theme-based games such as family names and Dos refrence words, for absolute geeks!!
7- http://www.esclub.gr/wordoxdictionary.html
Html word list grouped by word length
8 – http://www.morewords.com/wordsbylength/
Another html word list grouped by word length and initial
Hope this will help you in the creation of the perfect dictionary. If you know more or have a link to a localized dictionary, just post it in the comments.
(7 votes, average: 4.29 out of 5)
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This post has 12 comments
dino
Thanks a lot. That cleaned list is a whole lot better.
I still haven’t figure out how to import a text list into a flash game, without loading it externally. Any ideas on that?
Hawdon
Thanks Emanuele!
This is great stuff!
Cheers!
Danny
How the hell do you find those things?!?
Never the less, great stuff Emanuele. keep up the good work,
and never forget to monetize :D
Zach Foley
Anybody had any luck adding a list like this into flash? I find that i cannot make an array, an XML, a swc, or anything else I compile into the game.
The lists seem to be longer than what AS3 can handle.
(I have tried making the list a variable, and using [embed] and then accessing it as a string or XML.)
It either fails to compile, or returns a null object.
rocketman
Zach, I got it to work. I embedded and created it as a string, then I used string.indexOf() to look up words.
Roland
Great word list can be found at http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/
Download “12dicts-5.0.zip ”
Inside the zip, there is a readme.html file which describes in detail each text file. The ideal one is the 3esl.txt list which is compiled from dictionaries for learners of english as a second language. You will still need to clean out some words and phrases though :)
Mike
That cleaned up wordlist is a lot better, but it still doesn’t have many forms of verbs (like past tense) and plural of nouns, so it still isn’t very useful to check if a word exists or not.
mario
thanks for sharing… this is useful!
MochiLand » Blog Archive » Dictionary.com Contest Reminder!
[...] Emanuele Feronato’s List [...]
samuvagyok
Hello!
Do you know any word list that contains a description of each word?
Thx!
S
Dictionary.com Contest Reminder! « Blam Yo!
[...] Emanuele Feronato’s List [...]
Pixie
Hi !
Thanks a lot for the clean version of the list and for all those links ! It’s not easy to check dictionnaries which are not in mother tongue…