Excalibur's British Dictionary 2.2
Installing the British Dictionary with Excalibur 3
- If you want Excalibur to recognise the dictionary as soon as the
program is launched, aim to keep the dictionary in the same folder
as Excalibur itself. If that's not convenient, keep it anywhere you
like, but put an alias for it in the folder which contains
Excalibur.
- If you want Excalibur to activate the dictionary automatically when
the program is launched, the dictionary (or an alias for it) must be
in the folder which contains Excalibur. Activate the dictionary by
choosing it on the Dictionary menu, and leave it activated when you
quit Excalibur.
Installing the British Dictionary with Excalibur 2.6
- If you want Excalibur to recognise the dictionary as soon as the
program is launched, aim to keep the dictionary in the same folder
as Excalibur itself. If that's not convenient, keep it anywhere you
like, but put an alias for it in the folder which contains
Excalibur.
- If you want Excalibur to activate the dictionary automatically when
the program is launched, the dictionary (or an alias for it) must be
in the folder which contains Excalibur. Activate the dictionary by
choosing it on the Dictionary menu. Then choose Preferences from
the Options menu, check the checkbox called "Load currently active
dictionaries", and click "Save Now".
Words belonging to the -ise / -ize group
The British Dictionary includes both "is" and "iz" forms for words
where either can be used, such as realise/realize and
realisation/realization.
It is worth noting that "is" and "iz" are not always interchangeable.
About 50 verbs, and words based on them, are always spelled with "is"
(advise, chastise, exercise); and a few are always spelled with "iz"
(size, capsize). Prise and prize are different verbs.
Words ending with -able, -ably, -ability, -ableness
On the whole, variant spellings have been included if they are
recognised as alternatives by the Concise Oxford Dictionary. The
exception is words ending in -able and their derivatives. The Concise
Oxford has this to say: "The dropping of e before -able is very
unpredictable, and the first (or only) spelling given in the
dictionary should be preferred". Following this advice, only the
Concise Oxford's preferred spelling of these words has been included,
except in the case of a couple of words. Thus hatable but rateable;
takable but shakeable; framable but blameable, and so on.
Words ending with -o
Nouns ending with -o commonly form their plural by adding -s, although
quite a few form the plural by adding -es or can form it either way.
However in British use verbs ending with -o regularly form the
3rd-person singular of the present tense by adding -es. A few words
ending with -o are both noun and verb, so there is an obvious pitfall
which no spelling checker can avoid. These are the words that might
cause confusion:
Noun, plural Verb, 3rd-person
crescendo crescendos crescendoes
disco discos discoes
ditto dittos dittoes
do dos or do's does
echo echoes echoes
embargo embargoes embargoes
giro giros giroes
go goes goes
halo halos or haloes haloes
hello hellos helloes
hollo hollos holloes
hullo hullos hulloes
intaglio intaglios intaglioes
kayo kayos kayoes
lasso lassos or lassoes lassoes
litho lithos lithoes
mambo mambos mamboes
photo photos photoes
radio radios radioes
silo silos siloes
solo solos soloes
stucco stuccoes stuccoes
tango tangos tangoes
torpedo torpedoes torpedoes
veto vetoes vetoes
video videos videoes
zero zeros zeroes
Medical and other specialist words
I discarded many technical words from the original version of the
British Dictionary because they were rather too specialised for a
general spelling checker this size, and because I had no means of
verifying them. They were mostly medical words and their spelling was
a mixture of British and American. Many users will find the
dictionary more efficient without words like "hemangioendotheliomata".
Users who need these words should have a look on the Excalibur site
for files called "Biomed". The Excalibur site also hosts a collection
called "LsdSpell for Excalibur" which contains vocabulary used in Life
Science subjects, and a smaller collection called "Medical
Dictionary".
Names and other proper nouns, etc.
The dictionary includes ten thousand names and other words that would
normally contain one or more capital letters. Some of these words
were hard to verify. One difficulty is that there are some very
similar names, for instance Frankfurt in Germany and several American
cities called Frankfort. Another is that the conventional
Anglicisation of foreign names can change over time
(Djakarta/Jakarta). On occasion I have included one form but not
another equally valid, for instance Ormond as in Great Ormond Street
Hospital, but not Ormonde as in the Earl of Ormonde; or have excluded
both, for instance Llewellyn and Llewelyn which are both correct in
different contexts. Users should therefore not assume that the
spelling of a name included in this collection is the only correct
spelling of the name they have in mind. Please let me know if you
find mistakes or obsolete spellings.
Customising the dictionary
If you use Excalibur 3, it is not difficult to adapt the dictionary to
suit your particular requirements. Some users prefer to keep the
original dictionary intact and make use of custom dictionaries for the
extra vocabulary that everyone needs. An outstanding feature of
Excalibur 3, though, is the astonishing speed with which it converts
even an unsorted list of words to a dictionary. This makes it much
easier than before to amalgamate custom dictionaries with the main
dictionary, or to delete particular words that are causing problems.
Use Conversions on the Dictionary menu to convert the dictionary to
text. In the text file that Excalibur produces, delete the words you
don't want, add the extra words you do want, and save the result,
checking that it is still a plain text file. There's no need to sort
the words you add. To avoid minor problems and complaints from
Excalibur, it's as well to quit Excalibur before creating the new
dictionary. Move the original dictionary or its alias out of the
Excalibur folder, then relaunch Excalibur. Again using Conversions on
the Dictionary menu, convert the revised text file to a new
dictionary. Note that you can't do conversions when seven
dictionaries are listed on the dictionary menu, nor while the main
spell-checking window is open.
Sources, tools, and other inputs
The "o5" list of the British National Corpus was used as a word-mine,
and thanks are due to the compilers of the British National Corpus, to
the University of Brighton, and to Adam Kilgarriff for making it
available. Paul Hoffman's FRELI word list was a useful source of
words and thanks are expressed to him too. Other word lists available
on the internet were searched for possible additions. The National
Trust kindly supplied a list of their properties in England and Wales,
a selection of which has been included. I am also indebted to English
Heritage for names of important properties in England, and to the
National Trust for Scotland. Excalibur users responded to an appeal
to send in their words, and their contributions were appreciated.
Other friends contributed words from their special fields of interest.
Unfortunately no first-class British-English spelling checker was
available to help with this revision, but the British spelling
checkers of Microsoft Word and ClarisWorks were made use of, as was
Excalibur's American-English "Standard Dictionary".
85% of the entries in the dictionary were hand-checked. In view of
the large number of words involved, it would be unrealistic to expect
that no errors slipped through, but I hope that they will not be
numerous. Please let me know if you find mistakes. The Concise
Oxford Dictionary, 9th edition 1995, reprinted with corrections 1998,
was the principal work of reference.
It is a pleasure to express special thanks to Rick Zaccone, for his
moral support and practical help at a stage when the extent of the
work required became apparent, and to Jacek Iwanski, whose program
Word List Maker provided me with an essential tool.
Version history
The original British Dictionary (no version number) contained 125,907
words and had been in use for some years. Its origins are no longer
known. A little over 60% of its contents were good, and have been
retained. However it also included corrupt entries, many
over-specialised or un-British words, and American spellings; and it
lacked words that are common in British English. For the record, the
last of the American spellings to be tracked down and eliminated (in
version 2.2) was "whodunit".
My first revision (no version number) was released in April 1999, with
100,295 words. 42,238 entries were deleted from the original version,
and 16,626 were added.
Version 2.1 was released in June 1999, with 104,343 words. 1,343
entries were deleted and 5,391 were added, including the alternative
"iz" spellings mentioned above.
Version 2.2 is due for release in June 2000, with 113,255 words.
5,698 entries were deleted and 14,610 were added. This release
completes my revision of the dictionary.
The Abyzed collections
I have recently released separate collections of verbs, nouns, and
adjectives and adverbs, as used in British English. They are called
"Abyzed Verbs", "Abyzed Nouns", and "Abyzed Adjectives". The
collections, which are in part a spin-off from the revision of
Excalibur's British Dictionary, are intended as a resource for people
working on language projects. They show the relationship between
inflected words and their basic forms (go, goes, going, went), and
they include hyphenated words and capitalisation. They are freeware,
without restriction on use or distribution. The collections are
available at the Info-Mac archives. For users in Britain a speedy
download is normally obtainable via the Info-Mac directory at:
<ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/info-mac/_Education/_Language/>.
A final word from Lewis Carroll
"En-gulph-ed," Alice repeated, dividing the word into syllables.
"There's no such word in the language!" said the Wasp.
"It's in this newspaper, though," Alice said a little timidly.
"Let it stop there!" said the Wasp, fretfully turning away his head.
From "The Wasp in a Wig", by Lewis Carroll, published by Macmillan,
London, 1977, a chapter of "Alice Through the Looking-Glass" omitted
from the original publication.
Adrienne Forbes
<dandaforbes@netmatters.co.uk>
11th June 2000