How to make a word list from an aspell dictionary

I am working on something that needs a list of words, without regard to american vs. british or accents or anything: just has to be as many words as possible.  There are a whole bunch of aspell dictionaries available.  First expand the files:

preunzip *.wl

Then merge into a single list, eliminating duplicates:

sort –unique –ignore-case *.wl >list.txt

In additon, I want everything to be UTF-8:

iconv -f ISO8859-1 -t UTF-8 list.txt >ulist.txt

Pretty simple.  The merged english word list has 137,883 words.

One Response to “How to make a word list from an aspell dictionary”

  1. Sharky Says:

    I couldnt find a .wl file in the dictionary package i wished to extract wordlist for.

    then i figued out that i need to uncompress the .cwl file and NOT the .wl file

    preunzip *.cwl

    rest of the steps are pretty much the same

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