checking words in a dictionary

Question

I need to determine if an unknown 5 or 6 letter string is a valid word, i.e. is in the dictionary. I could submit the string/word to an online dictionary, but I need to check this string/word, which will be different each time, for about 100 to 150 times. This seems to be a bit time consuming.

My next thought would be to try to get a dictionary program of my own. It would need to be in Java as my program is written in Java. Does the Java API already have a class for doing this? Can I get a descent one that someone has already coded, and all I have to do is submit the string/word to it?

My program is not being used for spell checking. I want to write a program for unscrambling the Jumbled Word Puzzles when I get stuck on a scrambled word. Thanks for your suggestions.

Answer 1

You could use one of the open source dictionaries and load it into a database: ftp://ftp.cerias.purdue.edu/pub/dict/ and ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/wordlists/

Answer 2

aspell and its associated word lists and dictionaries might be the answer.

Answer 3

I think aspell has a Java version.

edit: actually it looks like you might do better with this aspell spinoff called Jazzy.

Answer 4

Maybe you can check some wordlist: http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/

This page has some word lists in text format, so you can process in Java yourself, most easily using a HashSet. You need to use more efficient data structures if efficiency is important.

Answer 5

For scrambled words, you might want to look at the Jumble algorithm, an implementation of which is seen here.

Answer 6

Maybe you could try Peter Norvig's spelling checker. I think it's an elegant way to get 80-90% accuracy.

Answer 7

If you don't need spell checking this would be really easy. Just load all your words into a HashSet and then check to see if that set contains the word you want to test. There are tons of word lists available.

If you do need a spell checker, then check out aspell or other free APIs.