Free German Dictionary

Free German Dictionary Readme ============================= What is it? ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ That's easy enough to answer: A list of German words as plain text file with slightly more than 1.3 million entries (including inflected forms). The format is one word per line, alphabetically ordered. It is mainly distributed as a 7-Zip archive (german.7z). Other downloads available include binary Aspell dictionaries, for both German and Swiss spelling (aspell_dict.7z), and a version that works with the free editor PSPad (PSPad.7z). What is it good for? ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ That's another easy question. It can be used for all kinds of purposes, including dictionary attacks on weak passwords. Its chief purpose, however, is to be used as the main dictionary for the free command-line based spell checker GNU Aspell. That's why most entries were, and all forthcoming entries will be, very carefully spell-checked. GNU Aspell? Why would I want to use such an old program? ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ Most modern spell-checking software uses advanced algorithms that allow for compound words, such as the (in)famous "Donaudampfschifffahrts- gesellschaftskapitänsmützenabzeichen." While this is undeniably an advantage over the list-based approach taken by Aspell, the downside of it is that a large number of misspellings will not be detected unless they are expressly blacklisted. "Vorgesetze," "Währungsfond," "National- soziallisten" are cases in point. Most spell-checkers do not recognize those as errors, but Aspell does. On the minus side, there will inevitably be plenty of false positives, even with a huge dictionary like this. Besides, the extremely popular, GPL-licensed editor Notepad++ relies on Aspell for its spell-checking functionality. How to use the word list as input for Aspell ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ Obviously, you'll need GNU Aspell as a prerequisite. Get it from http://aspell.net Most Windows users will want to download the binary Win32 port and the precompiled German dictionaries by Björn Jacke, available from http://aspell.net/win32/ Install both to a directory of your choice, in an MS Windows environment preferably something like %PROGRAMFILES%\aspell\ After completing the installation process, navigate to your aspell\bin directory in a command line and type: aspell --lang=de create master ./de-only.rws < path\to\german.dic This will create the file de-only.rws, which you should move to the aspell\dict folder, replacing the one that comes with Björn's German language pack for Aspell. Rather than compiling the dictionary for yourself, you may want to download my precompiled Aspell dictionary files provided at http://sourceforge.net/projects/germandict/files/aspell_dict.7z Just copy the contents of the archive to the dict subfolder of your Aspell installation. Credits ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ Thanks to: - Kevin Atkinson (GNU Aspell) - László Németh (Hunspell) - Björn Jacke (igerman98 dictionaries) - Franz Michael Baumann (extended Hunspell dictionary) - Marcin Miłkowski and Daniel Naber (LanguageTool) - Wolfgang Lezius (Morphy) - Jan Fiala (PSPad) - Jens Lorenz (Spell checker for Notepad++) - Kim Haskell and Denis G. Sureau (Dictionary maker tools) - Matthias Hüning (TextSTAT) - Jimbo Wales and the Wikipedia community (Wikipedia) - canoo.net (Online dictionary)