Difference between revisions of "Australian-English Spelling Dictionary"

Revision as of 06:23, 12 June 2009

History

The Australian-English Spelling dictionary is currently packaged with the English dictionaries in the OpenOffice 3.1 distribution.

It is available as an add-on extension for OpenOffice 3.0. And can be added to OpenOffice 2.X [1].

The current dictionary is based on the the United Kingdom English word list with an ad hoc collection of 'Australian' words added. I (David Wilson) have build up this list from a variety of public sources over several years, so that it includes place names, botanical and animal names, common personal names and 'Australianisms'. These have been added to an Australian word list over time.

The dictionary word list has been significantly increased by merging in a large number of new words from the British word lists in SCOWL (see links below).

Australian-English generally follows the conventions of British-English rather than American English. It may useful to see American and British English differences.

The Macquarie Dictionary is generally used by publishers, schools, universities and governments as the standard spelling reference. " The dictionary records standard Australian English spelling, which is closer to British and Canadian English than American English, with spellings like colour, centre, defence and practice/practise (noun/verb). It also gives -ise spellings first, listing -ize spellings as acceptable variants, unlike the Oxford English Dictionary and some other dictionaries of British English, that continue to prefer -ize to -ise in spite of the opposite tendency amongst the British general public (see Oxford spelling)." [2]

I suggest using this dictionary as the project's authoritative reference.

Objectives

The object of this project is improve the organisation and maintenance of the Australian-English Spelling Dictionary.

To improve the maintenance of the word list I propose to add structure to the project by maintaining separate word lists that are combined to produce the new versions of the Australian-English Spelling Dictionary. The separate word lists should help us to ensure we have the best coverage possible in each category.

The Australian-English Spelling Dictionary currently uses phonetic hints from the US-English Spelling Dictionary. These may need to be adjusted for Australian usage.

Issues

We also need to work out how to deal with the -ise vs -ize. Currently only the -ise words are included in the dictionary and -ize words are shown as errors.

We have at least three options:

1. Include only -ise words.
2. Include both -ise and -ize words.
3. It may be possible to include both -ise and -ize words but only suggest -ise spellings when suggesting spelling alternatives. This may be possible Using the NOSUGGEST option which is currently used to suppress a couple of obscene words from being displayed in the suggested spellings list.

Proposed Australian Word list Categories

• Place Names (use the Australian GeoNames list ?)
• Botanical Names (flora)
• Animal names (fauna)
• Australianism (drongo, bludger, reffo, etc.)
• Common personal and family names
• Medical and scientific terms. (i.e. haematology vs hematology)

Links

• Kevin's Word List Page, including the official Hunspell en_UK, en_US and en_CA dictionaries, created from SCOWL (Spell Checker Oriented Word Lists). Revision 6 August 10, 2004 by Kevin Atkinson

• OpenOffice spelling checker is based on Hunspell. Which is a spell checker and morphological analyzer library and program designed for languages with rich morphology and complex compounding or character encoding.

• The GeoNames geographical database covers all countries and contains over eight million place names that are available for download free of charge. The Australian place names list - AU.zip

• Australian English vocabulary and Australian English terms for people on Wikipedia.