wordlist

A wordlist is a collection of individual words compiled for use by software, researchers, and enthusiasts. It is usually stored as a plain text file with one word per line, though other formats exist. Wordlists vary in size from a few dozen entries to millions. They can be language-specific, thematic, or derived from dictionaries and corpora, and are foundational in many text-processing workflows.

Wordlists may be simple or enriched with metadata such as usage frequency, part of speech, or notes. Common formats include one word per line, sometimes with a frequency or rank, or as CSV/TSV with additional fields. Normalization steps often include lowercasing, removing diacritics, and applying stemming or lemmatization to collapse variants.

Creation methods rely on diverse sources, including public dictionaries, word-frequency lists from language corpora, web-scraped terms, and user-submitted compilations. To produce useful lists, curators deduplicate entries, resolve encoding issues (prefer UTF-8), and decide whether to preserve case or convert to lowercase. Frequency data helps NLP tasks; themed lists suit games and learning apps.

Applications span natural language processing, spell checking, autocompletion, search suggestions, language learning tools, and word games. In security contexts, wordlists are employed for testing password strength and for research into dictionary-based guessing techniques. Multilingual and domain-specific lists are common in professional deployments.

Quality and licensing considerations include copyright or usage restrictions, openness of the data, and attribution requirements. Practical concerns include coverage, speed, and memory usage; large lists may require compression or indexing. When building or selecting a wordlist, users balance breadth of coverage with relevance and processing constraints.

See also: lexicon, dictionary, corpora.