[personal profile] lmemsm
It's hard to find public domain, Open Source and Creative Commons licensed language resources in formats that are easy for programs to work with. There are growing resources of scanned public domain books. Among them, you can find all kinds of dictionaries and references. Some sites even use an OCR to translate scanned documents to text formats. However, the translated versions are usually full of typographical errors.

There are a few projects out there that use Free, Open Source or Creative Commons licensing and have a goal of creating dictionaries or other references in accessible and searchable digital format, but not a lot. It would be nice to see more projects of this sort. The results could be useful with word processors and editors (such as LibreOffice, Abiword, SciTE), electronic dictionaries (such as stardict) and games (such as anagramarama and scramble).

Here are some of the projects I've located:

XDXF, the XML dictionary interchange format, project had a collection of dictionaries and language translation word lists they were working with and converting to various formats.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/xdxf/files/
They also have tools for converting between XDXF and other formats:
https://github.com/soshial/xdxf_makedict

The Moby project is a wonderful public domain resource. It includes word lists, thesaurus and more.
http://icon.shef.ac.uk/Moby/

The Free Dictionaries Project also provides downloads. If you want to translate one language to another, this is a useful, free resource:
http://www.dicts.info/uddl.php

SCOWL (Spell Checker Oriented Word Lists) and Friends has useful word lists and resources for spell checker utilities:
http://wordlist.aspell.net/

YAWL (Yet Another Word List) is based on the updated Public Domain ENABLE (Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon).
You can also find Libre licensed word lists in FLOSS games such as anagramarama.
http://www.sourcefiles.org/Games/Puzzle/Other_Word_Games/

Public Domain Chinese Dictionaries. I'd love to see some of this translated to stardict format. stardict-tools has some simple command line tools translate other formats to stardict format.
https://mandarinportal.com/public-domain-chinese-dictionaries/

Here's a rhyming dictionary (source code and online example) that uses Moby project resources to find rhymes:
http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=8


If you know of other projects or developments in this area, I'd love to hear about them ( http://www.distasis.com/connect.htm ).

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