
The 2of12id.txt file is a revision of a portion of version 2 of the
AGID database.  It is intended to accurately reflect the level of
English vocabulary of the 2of12 list from my 12dicts package.  I
anticipate that it can be recombined with AGID, thereby improving the
quality and accuracy of future versions.  In the interests of this, I
transfer any intellectual property rights I may hold in 2of12id.txt to
Kevin Atkinson, subject to being allowed to continue to use it to
improve and maintain my 12dicts package.  [2of12id.txt is under
the same copyright of AGID, see README-agid for more information.
-- Kevin Atkinson]

The list includes entries for all lower-case words of more than one
character, excluding hyphenated words and contractions, from the
"full 2of12 list" in Kevin's 12dicts supplement.  Generally, a word
from that list which is an inflection of another word has been omitted,
unless it has inflections itself, or has a meaning which differs
significantly from its meaning as an inflection.  Because the latter
case never adds any further inflections, I was not particularly
assiduous about adding entries of this sort.

The syntax of the list is identical to that of AGID, with the following
exceptions:

I have added additional abbreviations for the less common parts of
speech, as follows:

	C: conjunction/preposition
	I: interjection
	P: pronoun
	S: spoken contraction

Lines which begin with a hyphen represent usages which I was able to
confirm, but which are not shown in my 12 source dictionaries.  Most
of these are specialized usages well outside the vocabulary of the
typical educated reader.  Similarly, any inflection beginning with a
hyphen represents an inflection which is not found in any of the 12,
and which I believe to be very unusual.  (Note that most of my source
dictionaries are not especially interested in irregular plurals, and
so upon occasion I have accepted plurals not explicitly shown there,
when I believe them to be reasonably common.  See below for information
on my handling of adjectival inflections.)

Most of the hyphenated lines in 2of12id were present in the original
AGID list.  I inserted a few more such lines for unusual forms of
12dicts words I encountered during my research.  This was a haphazard
process; there was no consistent effort to find or add such entries.

An inflection which is shown as a single hyphen indicates that the
inflection does not exist or is inapplicable.  Examples are the
present participle of the verb "shall" or the plural of the word
"ravioli" (which is usually regarded as already being plural).  This
notation is used only when some inflections are meaningful; if a word
(like the verb "begone") has no inflections whatever, no hyphens are
shown, and nothing follows the part of speech in the entry.

A word which begins with an @ represents an archaic or obsolete
inflection of a word which is not itself archaic.  A word may be
marked with both a hyphen and an @, in which case the hyphen
appears first.

A plural may begin with a ~ to indicate that it is a plural of a noun
considered "uncountable".  Examples of uncountable nouns are "mud",
"rayon", "oregano", "chess", "fairness", "integrity", "aluminum",
"materialism" and "chickenpox".  These nouns are not ordinarily
considered to have plurals, even though it is generally possible to
contrive situations where pluralization is reasonable.  Five of my
source dictionaries provide information about the countability of
nouns; for words not found in this subset, I have used my best
judgment.  I have occasionally overridden my sources, when I believed
they were clearly wrong.  For instance, the sources agree that "hatred"
is uncountable, but anyone who follows the news from Bosnia has seen
the word "hatreds" far too many times to consider it rare.  I did not
mark the countability of plurals excluded via the hyphen notation.

My notations for the precedence of multiple inflections for the same
word are similar to the AGID notations but, because I do not feel I
can in general accurately rank alternative forms by frequency of
occurence, I use the notations somewhat differently.

When inflections are separated by a "/", it indicates that there is
no clear agreement on which form appears first in the list of
alternatives.  At Kevin's request, the first form in such a list
reflects my best guess for the most common form or, if I have none,
my preference.

When inflections are separated by a "|", different inflections are used
for different meanings or usages of the word.  I have used Kevin's
brace notation to mark each (or occasionally all but one) inflection
with an associated meaning or context, except in one case.  Many
animals and fish (e.g., "salmon") fall into a common pattern, where
the standard English plural "salmons" represents several individuals,
especially of different kinds, while the uninflected "salmon" is used
when speaking of a collection.  When I use a "|" without providing any
context, this specific pattern is thereby indicated.  The order of
inflections in a "|" list has no significance.

I use Kevin's "form1 (form2)" notation whenever my sources mostly agree
on the order in which they cite the various forms.  This is not
necessarily a statement about frequency of usage, since dictionaries
sometimes omit common forms, or rank forms by criteria other than
frequency.  There is no indication, like the AGID double-parenthesis
notation, to distinguish especially uncommon usages (other than the
hyphen, described above).  Cases where both forms are extremely common,
such as "proved (proven)" are not distinguished from ones where the
second form is seldom encountered, like "bandits (banditti)".

This list was prepared by validating the original subset of the AGID
list against a subset of the 12dicts source dictionaries, and against
several other larger dictionaries.  Any forms which were not found in
the larger set were simply removed from the list, while those which
were confirmed as valid but not found in the 12dicts sources were
marked with hyphens as described above.  (The fact that an entry or
word was removed does not necessarily mean it was invalid, merely
that I did not locate it in the additional references I chose to use.)
As noted above, because most of the 12dicts sources were not very
interested in inflections, I sometimes was forced to include
inflections cited only by the auxiliary sources, especially for
plurals of uncountable nouns like diseases.

The inflections of adjectives and adverbs had to be handled specially.
Most dictionaries, including all but 2 of the 12dicts sources, simply
do not provide consistent and reliable information about these
inflections.  I used a small set of additional sources for this
information.  Ironically, my most reliable sources for adjective
inflections are not so good in other ways, and were in fact disjoint
from the set I used for everything else.  Because several of my
adjectival sources were Scrabble-related, where the tendency is to
include any remotely plausible inflections, I had to exercise a lot
of judgment about which forms were actually reasonable to include.
For these reasons, I feel that the reliability of the information
about adjectival inflections is much lower than for other aspects
of this list.

-- 
           Alan Beale               biljir@pobox.com
   "So toss away stuff you don't need in the end
    But keep what's important, and know who's your friend."
                                                    - Phish










