Re my game I did it for my own interest and to use myself. As far as the words are concerned I copied the first 800,000 in by hand from dictionaries and other books from 1985 to 1996 since I wasn't connected to the internet until 1997 after I retired. I have probably as large a collection of dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopedias, crossword dictionaries and English writing and grammar both printed and on CD as anyone. My count of just CDs is getting towards 100. I have picked up extra words from internet lists and other data available. Often I only get a few thousand extra words from a large list and have to sort out lots of spelling errors by checking each word. I usually send the list authors lists of spelling errors. For example I helped correct a lot of Wordnet early errors and got them to add British spellings. I have made sure my own list has all British and US spellings, all inflexions and compound words which may be one word, two words or hyphenated. When Moby's lists were released I found massive numbers of errors but little I didn't have. I have been building up lots of phrases by searching the British National Corpus using phrase word patterns. My list has words characterised as dictionary, encyclopaedic and technical, non-dictionary, US scrabble, British scrabble, common words, academic words, and so on so I can search sub-groups. I have many thousands of words I have not yet added because I have not sorted them out from the rubbish yet. I have been gathering information a very large net type thesaurus.
As far as releasing the program it is still a work in progress which I will probably never finish. Because of my illness I could never find the time or the energy that would be required to deal with the support required. I have tried interaction with people over the web on various projects but it took too much out of me. Just this little bit of interaction has been hard enough.
