Dictionary questionv

[tedsmith]

Does anybody know how to access the words in say the Microsoft dictionary using vb6 or how it is structured?
I have in mind an app that I can use to cheat on my wife who religiously does one of the word-whiz type puzzles in a newspaper that ask for all the words you can make up from a collection of 9 letters but containing one specific letter.
I would enter all the letters and press a button -voila!

 

[dilettante]

What "Microsoft dictionary" do you mean? There isn't one in Windows that I think of. Is this some other product?

It sounds like you want an anagram utility. Surely there are a ton of these, even free ones.

 

[tedsmith]

By "dictionary" I meant the reference information that allows a spell checker to underline an incorrect word in a document.
I had thought if I could access this collection of words I could do a search to get all correctly spelt words possible from a collection of 9 letters.
I was more interested in the exercise of doing it myself rather than using an app that someone else has already done - that's the fun of programming that many people seem to have lost these days. They just want instant results.
Presently I have no idea of how a spell checker's collection of words is organised but it must be something like an indexed dictionary- I would imagine.

 

[tedsmith]

Sorry I should have checked other forums first. I see there are some answers there

 

[guitarzan]

There are many text file word lists on the web, such as here:

http://www.scrabblejunction.org/wordlists.htm

 

[dilettante]

So just get a word list, sort it. Then you can do binary searches on the word list to check each permutation.

Seems simple enough.

 

[strongm]

> I see there are some answers there

For accessing the MS dictionaries? Really? Whilst MS originally intended to provide an open API for that (the Common Spelling API), they quickly dropped the idea (sometime back in 2001 or so); CSAPI still exists for 3rd parties to develop their own language tools (or to enhance the MS ones), you are not able to use them to access the MS ones - the documentation and licensing is pretty explicit "CSAPI may not be used to call into Microsoft's spell check engine and lexicon". You are pretty much limited to using Office automation if you want to sue the MS spell checker.