WordNet

WordNet is organized by the concept of synonym sets (synsets), groups of words that are roughly synonymous in a given context. The glossary definition and the example sentences are shared among all synonyms in a given synset. This is why you'll find, for example, in the definitional gloss for "insure" the example sentence: "This nest egg will ensure a nice retirement for us".

Our lexicographers write them.

From the foreword to WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database, pp. xviii-xix:

People sometimes ask, "Where did you get your words?" We began in 1985 with the words in Kučera and Francis's Standard Corpus of Present-Day Edited English (familiarly known as the Brown Corpus), principally because they provided frequencies for the different parts of speech. We were well launched into that list when Henry Kučera warned us that, although he and Francis owned the Brown Corpus, the syntactic tagging data had been sold to Houghton Mifflin. We therefore dropped our plan to use their frequency counts (in 1988 Richard Beckwith developed a polysemy index that we use instead). We also incorporated all the adjectives pairs that Charles Osgood had used to develop the semantic differential. And since synonyms were critically important to us, we looked words up in various thesauruses: for example, Laurence Urdang's little "Basic Book of Synonyms and Antonyms" (1978), Urdang's revision of Rodale's "The Synonym Finder" (1978), and Robert Chapman's 4th edition of "Roget's International Thesaurus" (1977) -- in such works, one word quickly leads on to others. Late in 1986 we received a list of words compiled by Fred Chang at the Naval Personnel Research and Development Center, which we compared with our own list; we were dismayed to find only 15% overlap.

So Chang's list became input. And in 1993 we obtained the list of 39,143 words that Ralph Grishman and his colleagues at New York University included in their common lexicon, COMLEX; this time we were dismayed that WordNet contained only 74% of the COMLEX words. But that list, too, became input. In short, a variety of sources have contributed; we were not well disciplined in building our vocabulary. The fact is that the English lexicon is very large, and we were lucky that our sponsors were patient with us as we slowly crawled up the mountain.

WordNet only contains "open-class words": nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Thus, excluded words include determiners, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, and particles.

See above

Please, tell us.

If you are referencing design decisions or the general concepts behind WordNet, standard practice is to cite "the WordNet book", WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database. You can get the full details at the MIT Press site or ISBN: 026206197X.

If you wish to cite a definition, WordNet 3.0 is copyright Princeton University, 2006. The online interface has the URL:

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=word-you-want

or

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn3.0?s=word-you-want

For instructions on how to set an environment variable in Windows, please see: Google search for: site:microsoft.com Windows environment variables or a page about environment variables

The variables you'll want to set for WordNet are:

Name	Value	Example (Linux/*nix)	Example (Windows)
WNHOME	WordNet's home directory	/usr/local/WordNet-3.0	C:\Program Files\WordNet\2.1
WNSEARCHDIR	WordNet's dict directory	/usr/local/WordNet-3.0/dict	C:\Program Files\WordNet\2.1\dict

This is a problem with InstallShield, we think. For now, the workaround is to move the installer (WordNet-3.0.exe) into an empty folder and try again.

The error should be similar to the following:

/bin/install: `wnutil.3WN.html' and `/usr/local/WordNet-3.0/doc/html/wnutil.3WN.html' are the same
file
make[3]: *** [install-htmlDATA] Error 1
make[3]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/WordNet-3.0/doc/html'
make[2]: *** [install-am] Error 2
make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/WordNet-3.0/doc/html'
make[1]: *** [install-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/WordNet-3.0/doc'
make: *** [install-recursive] Error 1

The build process is intended to be run from a temporary directory which is different from the directory to which WordNet will be installed. So, don't extract WordNet-3.0.tar.bz2 to /usr/local/WordNet-3.0 if you intend to install it to the default location. Instead, extract it to a temporary location (e.g. your home directory). Once WordNet is installed successfully, you can remove the directory.

If you receive the error:
wishwn: error while loading shared libraries: libtk.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such
file or directory, you need to create some symbolic links. Some Linux distributions no longer have links for backwards compatibility that are necessary for running WordNet.

You need to setup the appropriate links. The commands will be similar to:

cd /usr/lib
ln -s libtk.so libtk.so.0
ln -s libtcl.so libtcl.so.0

Note that the first argument to each ln command may require a version number. (e.g. ln -s libtk8.4.so libtk.so.0)

For the browser to function properly, it must know where you installed WordNet. The installer is supposed to set up some environment variables which tell the browser where to find the WordNet files. If these variables are not set properly, it will by default try: %PROGRAM%\WordNet\(version) (Where %PROGRAM% is C:\Program Files on U.S. English systems.) The variables that need to be set are (Assuming you install to D:\Other\WordNet):

Variable	Value
WNHOME	D:\Other\WordNet
WNSEARCHDIR	D:\Other\WordNet\dict

(also see: (How do I set an environment variable?))

You may need to set your PATH variable to include WordNet's /bin directory. (also see: (I installed to a non-default location, and get error messages.) and (How do I set an environment variable?))

This is a problem with InstallShield, we think. For now, the workaround is to move the installer (WordNet-3.0.exe) into an empty folder and try again.

This was accidentally left in the Windows port.

The (ASCII) database format is well-documented. See WordNet documentation index, specifically WordNet man page: wndb.5WN.

WordNet provides a C API to use WordNet from a C program. The API documentation is available online and is distributed with the main WordNet packages.

Interfaces for many other languages are available via our related projects page.

No. The morphological component of the WordNet library is unidirectional. Along with a set of irregular forms (e.g. children - child), it uses a sequence of simple rules, stripping common English endings until it finds a word form present in WordNet. Furthermore, it assumes its input is a valid inflected form. So, it will take "childes" to "child", even though "childes" is not a word.