I’m thrilled to announce the release of my new package words. words is an extremely simple package, but I’m excited to use it for my future projects.

Recently I’ve been playing around with some word based puzzles in R. One of the examples of this is wordbuilder, which finds all valid words of from a given list of 5 letters. In an example like this, one of the challenges is finding a list of valid english words.

One of the first examples that comes up when you search for english words is this repo. While I started using this, I realised that its main issue was it contained abbreviations, with no simple way of filtering them out. With a bit more searching, I found a collection of json files hosted by Word Game Dictionary that contain words allowed in scrabble.

Usage of words is extremely simple - it contains just a single dataset!

words is currently pending acceptance by CRAN. For now, you can download it from github.

devtools::install_github("condwanaland/words")
## Skipping install of 'words' from a github remote, the SHA1 (cd44c435) has not changed since last install.
##   Use `force = TRUE` to force installation

From there, just call data to load the word dataset.

library(words)
data("words")

The word dataset just contains 2 columns. One for the words, and one showing the length of each word.

head(words)
##   word word_length
## 1   aa           2
## 2   ab           2
## 3   ad           2
## 4   ae           2
## 5   ag           2
## 6   ah           2

If you do any projects in R that require word dictionaries, I hope you’ll find words useful.