2007 Sep 15 - Sat

Word Lists with a Calculator

FreshMeat, contrary to any derogatory images it may conjure in your mind, is a site dedicated to publicizing releases of open source software. It is a great combo to SourceForge.

Today on Freshmeat was a link to Frink, "a practical calculating tool and programming language designed to help us all to better understand the world around us, to help us get calculations right without getting bogged down in the mechanics, and to make a tool that's really useful in the real world. It tracks units of measure (feet, meters, kilograms, watts, etc.) through all calculations, allowing you to make physical calculations easily, to mix units of measure transparently, and ensures that the answers come out right." It deserves a special link on my toolbar.

One of the things it know how to do is word searches. Cheating at Scrabble is one suggested use. The interesting point, though, is that in one of the descriptions, he points to word list he uses: Grady Ward's Moby, a lexicon project. It has a hyphenator, part-of-speach definitions, pronunciator, Shakespeare, Thesaurus, and 610,000 words and phrases. It shows as a last update being around the year 2000 or so.