Question

Does anyone know a good .NET dictionary API? I’m not interested in meanings, rather I need to be able to query words in a number of different ways – return words of x length, return partial matches and so on…

Answer 1

Grab the flat text file from an open source spellchecker like ASpell (http://aspell.net/) and load it into a List or whatever structure you like.

for example,

List<string> words = System.IO.File.ReadAllText('MyWords.txt').Split(new string[]{Environment.NewLine}).ToList();  // C# 3.0 (LINQ) example:      // get all words of length 5:     from word in words where word.length==5 select word      // get partial matches on 'foo'     from word in words where word.Contains('foo') select word  // C# 2.0 example:      // get all words of length 5:     words.FindAll(delegate(string s) { return s.Length == 5; });      // get partial matches on 'foo'     words.FindAll(delegate(string s) { return s.Contains('foo'); });