How to Import an English Dictionary Into Python

In this tutorial, I will guide you on how to import an English dictionary into Python, which can be quite helpful for language-based machine-learning projects or any project that needs to analyze or manipulate English texts.

We will make use of Python’s text-based processing power and a readily available dictionary file in order to import an entire English dictionary into our Python environment.

Step 1: Get a dictionary file

The first thing you will need is a dictionary file. A quick search on Google should present you with various options. However, for the purposes of this tutorial, we will make use of a dictionary file available in Dwyl’s English-Words Github repository.

This file contains over 370,000 English words. To download it, simply click the raw button and save the webpage. Alternatively, you can also clone the repository and fetch the words_alpha.txt file which is found under the words folder.

Step 2: Loading the file into Python

After downloading the dictionary, the next step is to import it into Python. The preferred method for doing this is through Python’s built-in open() function.

You can import the file and read through its content by opening the words_alpha.txt file and reading through it as shown below:

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with open('words_alpha.txt', 'r') as file:
    dictionary = file.read().splitlines()

In this example, ‘words_alpha.txt’ is the file name. Make sure to replace this with your file path if it’s not located in the same directory as your script. The dictionary will be stored in a list where each entry is a word from the dictionary.

Step 3: Use the dictionary

With the dictionary loaded, you can now use it to check if a given word exists. Let’s say you want to check whether the word ‘pythonic’ exists in your dictionary. The code snippet would look like this:

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if 'pythonic' in dictionary:
    print("The word exists!")
else:
    print("The word does not exist.")

Full Code:

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with open('words_alpha.txt', 'r') as file:
    dictionary = file.read().splitlines()
 
if 'pythonic' in dictionary:
    print("The word exists!")
else:
    print("The word does not exist.")

Output:

The word exists!

Conclusion:

In this tutorial, we have walked through a simple way to import an English dictionary into a Python script.

This can be a handy tool when working with language-based operations, especially in natural language processing and machine learning. Having a dictionary available in your program unlocks many possibilities and facilitates text-processing tasks. Happy coding!