Dictionary in OS X

[Marty Billingsley]

Gregory Lypny <gregory.lypny at videotron.ca> writes:
>
> I had read somewhere that it is possible to access some built-in Mac
> applications, such as Dictionary, directly from the command line.
> Now I was wondering whether it would also be possible to access those
> applications through Revolution.  I'm doing research that involves
> indexing all the words in big text files.  Of course, using the xTalk
> definition of a word as any quoted string or string separated by one
> or more spaces leaves me with many words that are not words we use in
> the sense of dictionary words, things like acronyms, and others that
> aren't relevant to me because they are proper nouns, such as company
> or product names.  So I was hoping to write a script that might check
> whether each of the words in my index exists in the dictionary.
>
> Any thoughts would be most appreciated.

Look in /usr/share/dict for the lists of words.  You might be able
to use these files for your index-checker.

(As an aside, why wouldn't you want proper nouns in your index if they're
relevant to your topic?)

  - marty

--
Marty Billingsley (marty at ucls.uchicago.edu)
The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools