needs a bit of cleanup

[huttarl]

It's very handy to have this list.
It does have a few non-words in it, possibly due to OCR errors. A couple I caught were

• brainwashjng
• neritjc

[nelsonic]

@huttarl thanks a bunch for reporting this issue!
Would you mind opening the source file in SublimeText, editing the offending word and submitting a Pull Request to update it?

I've invited you to be a collaborator on the repo: https://github.com/dwyl/english-words/invitations
and to be a member of DWYL: https://github.com/dwyl so you can create branches on the repo without having to fork.

Thanks! ❤️

[huttarl]

Thanks for the invitation.

There's a lot more cleanup that could be done. It would be a substantial undertaking. If I invested that kind of time into an open-source word list -- which could be worthwhile -- I'd want to make sure it was one with a clear copyright / license / permission terms, which this one doesn't seem to have.

[nelsonic]

@huttarl please suggest the appropriate license. The words come from a couple of sources, but I don't know that much about Copyright for an alphabetical list of words ... would have thought Creative Commons would be good but honestly don't know.
Of the hundreds of people who have used the list you are only the second person to contribute back (even just open the issue is greatly appreciated!)
Thanks again! 👍

[huttarl]

I would think any license would have to be consistent with the permissions of the original source(s). But the only source listed in the README.md is infochimps (with "Copyright still belongs to them"), and since the link to infochimps is broken, I don't know what the constraints are.

[Smadarl]

Imported this into a TRIE tree, and found a single duplicate word: animate. Appears everything else is unique.

[nelsonic]

@Smadarl thanks for confirming that!
I think the animate duplicate has now been removed: #5 ...?

[mikestopcontinues]

For a word list, the public domain feels right, doesn't it? You can use CC0 to declare it:
https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/

[nelsonic]

@mikestopcontinues I agree, "Public Domain" feels appropriate for this list.
I never understood how an alphabetical list of english words could be copyrightable in the first place. But then I'm not a lawyer/legal-expert and most of the time I don't understand why people/companies feel the need to restrict usage of things which incur no incremental cost and result in no "loss" to the original creator...

If anyone has time to add the https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/ license as a Pull Request we'd gladly accept it! ✅

[dacbarbos]

While I salute the license choice, I still believe it would be wise of you to get a "written" agreement from CSC to avoid future "surprises".

[huttarl]

I agree with @dacbarbos... It's fine to discuss what we'd like the license to be, but until we know what restrictions infochimps has or hasn't put on the list, it seems like a moot point.

[dacbarbos]

I love seeing how GitHub is growing every year, practically becoming the new Wikipedia for supporters. While poking around, I found another interesting repo.

[nelsonic]

@dacbarbos that's such a cool/useful list for people learning English! 👍
good find! thanks for sharing!

[dacbarbos]

rulez! sharing is caring...

[nelsonic]

Cleanup performed in #11
Considering "fixed". ✅