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I would like to download an English dictionary -- not just a word list -- in a structured format such as TXT, XML, or SQL.

Specifically, I need phonetic pronunciation and parts of speech (definition is not required).

Surprisingly, I can't find this online anywhere. Wiktionary is available for download, but it only the mediawiki articles themselves. Crawling all articles and extracting the phonetics and parts of speech would be a huge exercise.

Is this available anywhere? I don't mind paying.

Note: cross-posted on StackOverflow.

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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is a request for resources.
    – user140086
    Apr 26, 2016 at 4:32
  • I'm voting to close user140086 as off-topic
    – parsecer
    Aug 22, 2020 at 22:15

5 Answers 5

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Ask around on the Omega Wiki, formerly known as the Ultimate Wiktionary or WiktionaryZ. Basically, they collect data from all the various wiktionaries, and make it available in a relational database.

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What about WordNet? It's released under a BSD-style licence. I heard somewhere this was the basis for the WordWeb programme.

WordNet® is a large lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser. WordNet is also freely and publicly available for download. WordNet's structure makes it a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing.

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I would suggest these databases formatted for the DICT protocol servers and clients, but I don't think they meet your criteria.

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There's the Moby project

tar.Z

in tar.Z format, or at Project Gutenburg:

in zip format.

It has parts of speech and pronunciation, in formatted text. There's also a thesaurus and other useful word lists.

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  • All the files on that page are giving me errors that their not accessible. I've contacted the webmaster and the author. HOWEVER, I was able to access an older version via the Way Back Machine (archive.org) at: web.archive.org/web/20081229025607/http://icon.shef.ac.uk/Moby But.... it's in tar.z format (which was able to read) but you have to Build it, which looks like you need to build it on Linux because there is (in Windows 7 at least) no BUILD Command Line command.
    – Clay Nichols
    Apr 17, 2012 at 1:51
  • @ClayNichols: I found another link at Project Gutenburg, in zip format, which I added to the answer. also note that as far as the OP is concerned, these are just word lists, there are no definitions.
    – Mitch
    Apr 17, 2012 at 2:05
  • @ClayNichols I just fetched the file myself and it looks like the contents have already been built. It seems the instructions still refer to an era where it was probably spread across multiple floppies somehow. (That said, it turns out to be questionable for my own use because it looks like it uses NA pronunciation. So I'm still on the hunt...)
    – Hakanai
    Nov 23, 2015 at 22:47
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Here are a couple of valuable databases. According to this paper on ZeuScansion,

To calculate the basic stress pattern of words necessary for step 1, we primarily use two pronunciation dictionaries: The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (Weide, 1998) and NETtalk (Sejnowski and Rosenberg, 1987). Each employs a slightly different notation, but they are similar in content: they both mark three levels of stress, and contain pronunciations and stress assignments.

They don't seem to include information about part of speech.

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