[Tutor] spell/grammar checking

[Isaac Hall]

Hi Peter,
I never thought about this before....But now that you have me thinking a 
bit, I will offer my opinion.  More than likely, at one time, someone or a 
group of someones sat down and actually coded in most of the words in the 
english (and other) languages into some kind of database (likely a 
database...maybe other things).  No doubt, there is probably some sort of 
access to this/these database(s) online.  However, I would venture a guess 
that because of the massive data entry effort involved in creating such a 
thing, more than likely, you might have to pay to be able to just get a 
listing of 'all the words'.  I did a quick search on google for 
dictionaries, and found that most of them online only allow you to look up 
words (for free of course).  However, I found that the mirriam-webster 
site might be useful in a spell-checking sort of way,  meaning all you 
need to code is the use/reading of the webpages  :)  I tried looking up 
the word 'theese'  which of course does not exist, and mirriam webster 
returned the following choices that I may have wanted instead:
	 1. Thess
	 2. Thais
	 3. these
	 4. thews
	 5. those
	 6. thous
	 7. thus
	 8. thaws
	 9. thatches
	10. Thurs
  
but as far as getting your own dictionary on your hard drive for a python 
script to access....Im still not quite sure how to do this...

Here is the mirriam-webster site, for your perusal:
http://www.m-w.com/netdict.htm

Ike

On Tue, 20 May 2003, Peter Jakubowicz wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I've been playing around with the guessing game and word counting case 
> studies in Alan Gauld's book, expanding them, and I am wondering where 
> people get the words for their spell checkers. Do programmers sit down and 
> actually write huge dictionary files, or are there things like that 
> available online? Thanks, Peter
> 
> 
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