Public-domain ebook
by Grady Ward
Language: en1,391 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: Language & Communication·Encyclopedias/Dictionaries/Reference
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #3205.
This volume is a specialized reference work that compiles English words and phrases with their phonetic transcriptions. The opening pages explain that the list was assembled from a variety of large‑scale lexical resources, hand‑crafted dictionaries from Carnegie Mellon, proofed collections from UCLA, and several machine‑generated corpora, while deliberately omitting entries that appear only in copyrighted sources. The editors describe a careful preprocessing stage, removal of dubious entries, and an ongoing plan to refine the material through user feedback. Contact information for the two principal maintainers is provided, and the copyright notice makes clear that the dictionary is freely reusable for research or commercial purposes, provided its origin is acknowledged.
The text reads like a technical memorandum from the early 1990s, with a straightforward, matter‑of‑fact tone that reflects its academic provenance. Readers who work in linguistics, speech synthesis, or natural‑language processing will appreciate the candid discussion of limitations and the invitation to contribute improvements. Anyone interested in the mechanics of pronunciation modeling, or in the history of computational lexicography, will find the book’s candid, collaborative spirit engaging.
The opening · free to read
Alternate transcriptions are identified with a numeral in parentheses as part of the lexical entry.
We generated this dictionary using the following independent sources: - a 20k+ general English dictionary, built by hand at CMU (extensively proofed and used). - a 200k+ UCLA-proofed version of the shoup dictionary. - a 32k subset of the Dragon dictionary. - a 53k+ dictionary of proper names, synthesiser-generated, unproofed. - a 200k dictionary generated with Orator, unproofed. - a 200k dictionary generated with Mitalk, unproofed.
All entries that occur solely in copyrighted sources, like the Dragon dictionary, are not currently included in this dictionary. If you have words and transcriptions that you would like included in this unrestricted resource, please send them to Robert L. Weide (weide@cs. cmu.edu) and we will consider them for an upcoming version.
All of the above sources were preprocessed and the transcriptions in the current cmudict.0.1 were selected from the transcriptions in the sources or a combination thereof. We have removed some potentially unreliable transcriptions from this dictionary, including those based on only one source, and will reintroduce them once we have verified the transcriptions.
CMU does not guarantee the accuracy of this dictionary, nor its suitablity for any specific purpose. In fact, we expect a number of errors, omissions and inconsistencies to remain in the current result. We intend to continually update the dictionary as we make progress in correcting them. We will make subsequent versions available via anonymous ftp, and those who would like notification when updated versions are available should send email to weide@cs.cmu.edu.
We welcome input from users: send e-mail to Robert L. Weide (weide@cs. cmu.edu) for comments and suggestions on the content of the dictionary, or to Peter Jansen (pjj@cs.cmu.edu) for questions regarding the combination process.
The Carnegie Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary [cmudict.0.1] is Copyright 1993 by Carnegie Mellon University. Use of this dictionary, for any research or commercial purpose, is completely unrestricted. If you make use of or redistribute this material, we would appreciate acknowlegement of its origin.
Finally, if you add words to or correct words in this dictionary, we would like the additions and corrections sent to us (weide@cs) for consideration in a subsequent version. All final entries will be approved by Robert L. Weide and Peter Jansen, editors of the dictionary.
The book keeps going
Reading is free forever. Sign up and watch scenes appear while you read.
Scenes Storieta drew for other classics.
New illustrated classics
Once or twice a month: the latest books to get full character casts, scene art, and free comic editions. No account needed.
