Moby Part of Speech List

About this book

The book is a reference work that catalogs English words and phrases together with their part‑of‑speech codes. The opening notes that this second edition expands the original list by fifteen thousand entries and revises many more for accuracy, claiming the title of the largest POS list in the world. It explains the format of each record, a word or phrase followed by a backslash and a single‑character code such as N for noun, V for verb, A for adjective, and so on, while also describing how entries are separated by standard line‑break characters. An example entry for “engineer\Nt” illustrates the dual function of a term as both noun and transitive verb, and the preface mentions conventions for participles, multi‑sense words, and foreign terms with diacritics. The introductory section even provides a brief “Quick Start” for copying the data files to a local directory.

Written in the concise, technical prose typical of early‑to‑mid‑20th‑century linguistic manuals, the voice is matter‑of‑fact and geared toward scholars, programmers, and anyone building natural‑language processing tools. Readers who appreciate systematic organization, detailed coding schemes, and historical perspectives on lexical resources will find this work especially useful. It appeals to linguists, computer scientists, and hobbyists interested in the mechanics of parsing English text.