Quackle uses many unusual words in its plays thanks to its comprehensive lexica. I found myself wanting to use a restricted lexicon that made me feel like I was playing a parlour game rather than a tournament game.
As such, I set out to create my own, more restricted, lexicon. I ran into two challenges: - Technical: building a .dawg lexicon file. - Editorial: Which words to choose? I have made some progress on the technical challenge. I took the source code for makeminidawg and produced a single makeminidawg.cpp module that will build as a standalone command-line application without the need for the rest of Quackle or Qt. I have built it on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. I hope that this will help people create their own customized lexica. The editorial challenge is trickier and arguably unsolvable. I produced a list of 63,012 words by taking the intersection of - Sowpods; and - A list I found of all the words in the British National Corpus that appear six or more times. The result is not entirely satisfactory; for example, TANKBUSTERS is in the list but not TANKBUSTER. However, I find that I personally prefer playing with this list so that when Quackle thrashes me I know most of the words it has used. I have put a tarball on my website at http://www.nihilist.org.uk containing: - The restricted lexicon; - The list of words that I ran through makeminidawg to create the restricted lexicon; - A Windows executable version of makeminidawg; - The source code for said makeminidawg (as per the GNU GPLv2); - A readme file explaining the contents; - A sample batch file for building the Windows executable. Enjoy! -- Nihilist
