Computer readable list of human names / phone directory?

Question

Hi all,

I'm trying to compile a decent .zwl file for squiggly spell checking in Flex; using British words, not American as supplied by default.

Ive managed to create a decent British list of words and ran them through the AdobeSpellingGen app to get a .zwl; great stuff.

However i need to add into this list a list of names, so they wont be flagged.

Does anyone know of a good source of either free, or paid for list of English Fore and surnames? Im trying BT as i type :)

Thanks, any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

There are lots of baby names sites out there. This might be a good one http://www.listofbabynames.org/a%5Fboys.htm as it would be fairly easy to copy.

I'll keep looking

Answer 2

You can screen scrape http://www.britishsurnames.co.uk/browse for a list of surnames. I'm not sure where you'd find first names though.

Answer 3

gnu aspell has spell checking for common names. You can try it out here:

http://chxo.com/scripts/spellcheck.php?showsource=1

source is here: http://aspell.net/

i'm not too familiar with it though so i couldn't tell you how to extract the dictionaries.

Answer 4

The US Census site has a list of >150k first names and surnames from the 1990 and 2000 censuses, at

http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/

Of course, these aren't UK names, but might do if you can't find anything better.