DictionaryLookup

DictionaryLookup[patt]

finds all words in an English dictionary that match the string pattern patt.

DictionaryLookup[patt,n]

gives only the first n words found.

DictionaryLookup[{"lang",patt}]

finds words in the language specified by lang.

Details and Options

  • No word stemming is done by default, so words like "jump", "jumps", and "jumping" appear separately.
  • By default, words appear as they would within a sentence. Setting the option IgnoreCase->True retrieves words whose letters appear in different cases.
  • DictionaryLookup[] gives a list of all words in the dictionary.
  • DictionaryLookup[All] gives a list of available dictionary languages.
  • DictionaryLookup[{"lang",All}] retrieves all words in the language dictionary lang.
  • DictionaryLookup[{All,patt}] retrieves all the languages containing words matching patt.

Examples

open allclose all

Basic Examples  (2)

Look up all English words beginning with "abb":

Look up all Spanish words beginning with "c", ending with "n", and with an "ñ" in between:

Scope  (3)

Variants such as "jumps" and "jumping" appear separately:

DictionaryLookup supports in-string patterns:

The first 10 words beginning with "z":

Generalizations & Extensions  (3)

Give a list of available dictionary languages:

Look up words beginning with "molecu" in all available languages:

Look up all Dutch and Spanish words beginning with "molecula":

Find all languages containing a word:

Options  (1)

IgnoreCase  (1)

Specify a lookup to be case insensitive:

Applications  (5)

Find the number of words in the dictionary starting with each letter:

Find all palindromes in the dictionary:

Find all palindromes that are both English and French words:

Find how many words contain each of the possible permutations of "a", "b", and "c":

Find all 4-letter words formed from "a" through "e":

Create a nearest function from all words in the dictionary:

Look up words closest to a given word:

Go further:

Neat Examples  (4)

Find what words might be confused with genomic sequences:

Pick 10 random words beginning with "a" from the dictionary:

A random collection of words from different languages:

Plot the word length histograms for each language:

Wolfram Research (2007), DictionaryLookup, Wolfram Language function, https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/DictionaryLookup.html (updated 2008).

Text

Wolfram Research (2007), DictionaryLookup, Wolfram Language function, https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/DictionaryLookup.html (updated 2008).

CMS

Wolfram Language. 2007. "DictionaryLookup." Wolfram Language & System Documentation Center. Wolfram Research. Last Modified 2008. https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/DictionaryLookup.html.

APA

Wolfram Language. (2007). DictionaryLookup. Wolfram Language & System Documentation Center. Retrieved from https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/DictionaryLookup.html

BibTeX

@misc{reference.wolfram_2023_dictionarylookup, author="Wolfram Research", title="{DictionaryLookup}", year="2008", howpublished="\url{https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/DictionaryLookup.html}", note=[Accessed: 18-March-2024 ]}

BibLaTeX

@online{reference.wolfram_2023_dictionarylookup, organization={Wolfram Research}, title={DictionaryLookup}, year={2008}, url={https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/DictionaryLookup.html}, note=[Accessed: 18-March-2024 ]}