English Words Dictionary

370,105 English words. Plain text and compact binary formats, served via GitHub Pages.

Downloads

Usage

Plain text

const resp = await fetch('https://wow-look-at-my.github.io/english-words/words_alpha.txt');
const words = (await resp.text()).split('\n').filter(Boolean);

Binary format

import { decompress } from 'https://wow-look-at-my.github.io/english-words/decompress.js';

const resp = await fetch('https://wow-look-at-my.github.io/english-words/words_alpha.dict.bin');
const buf = new Uint8Array(await resp.arrayBuffer());
const words = decompress(buf); // string[], 370,105 words sorted alphabetically

Gzipped binary (smallest download)

import { decompress } from 'https://wow-look-at-my.github.io/english-words/decompress.js';

const resp = await fetch('https://wow-look-at-my.github.io/english-words/words_alpha.dict.bin.gz');
const ds = new DecompressionStream('gzip');
const decompressed = resp.body.pipeThrough(ds);
const buf = new Uint8Array(await new Response(decompressed).arrayBuffer());
const words = decompress(buf);

Binary format spec

The .dict.bin format is a DFS-serialized trie. The entire dictionary is stored as a tree where shared prefixes are represented once. Each trie edge is encoded as a single byte:

Header: 4 bytes (word count as uint32 LE)

Body: 1 byte per trie edge (DFS order)
  bits 0-4: character (0-25 for a-z)
  bit 5:    end-of-word (this edge completes a valid word)
  bit 6:    has children (the target node has outgoing edges)
  bit 7:    last sibling (last child of the parent node)

1004 KB raw, 589 KB gzipped — 45% smaller than gzipping the plain text.

Source

github.com/wow-look-at-my/english-words