Moby Multiple Language Lists of Common Words

Metadata

Gutenberg ID

3206

Title

Moby Multiple Language Lists of Common Words

Language

en

Book source

Project Gutenberg

Description max 80 words

Grady Ward's Moby Language II offers extensive word lists for French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. Originally created in 2001, these ASCII-based files utilize phonetic spelling with backslashes to indicate accents, as they lack modern Unicode support. While no longer state-of-the-art, they remain a substantial resource for accessing over 560,000 unique words across five major languages.

Summary up to 500 words

Compiled by Grady Ward and released in January 2001, Moby Language II represents a significant historical contribution to the field of linguistic data, offering extensive vocabulary files for five major world languages: French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. When this dataset was integrated into the broader collection in 2007, it stood among the largest word lists available globally at that time. The compilation is distributed as a single zip file designed for MS-DOS systems. Upon decompression, the files exist in standard ASCII format utilizing CRLF delimiters, allowing them to be viewed and utilized like any ordinary text file. A defining technical characteristic of Moby Language II is its handling of non-English characters. Unlike modern eBooks that utilize standard Unicode or 8-bit accented characters, Ward's lists employ a phonetic spelling system. This method uses backslashes and other specific characters to denote where accents would typically occur. Unfortunately, the accompanying documentation lacks a detailed guide explaining how these surrogate characters map to their correct non-English equivalents. Consequently, accurately reconstructing the original words with proper accents is currently infeasible, representing a notable limitation for researchers seeking precise linguistic data. Despite this constraint, the dataset remains a substantial resource containing a total of 560,101 entries. The specific breakdown includes 138,257 French words, 159,809 German words, 60,453 Italian words, 115,523 Japanese words, and 86,059 Spanish words. While the text acknowledges that these lists are no longer the state-of-the-art compared to contemporary resources, they retain utility for specific needs. The intervening years have made it significantly easier for individuals to generate their own custom lists from the broader collection or other sources. Nevertheless, for those requiring the specific historical dataset or wishing to work with these unique phonetic representations, Moby Language II offers a vast repository of linguistic information that can be accessed and processed as standard text files.

LLM editorial rating

3.5/5

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https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3206.epub.noimages

Local file path

data/epubs/pg3206.epub

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Downloaded at

2026-07-01 08:52 UTC

Categories

• Words and phrase lists