A text file containing over 466k English words.

While searching for a list of english words (for an auto-complete tutorial) I found: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2213607/how-to-get-english-language-word-database which refers to http://www.infochimps.com/datasets/word-list-350000-simple-english-words-excel-readable (archived).

No idea why infochimps put the word list inside an excel (.xls) file.

I pulled out the words into a simple new-line-delimited text file. Which is more useful when building apps or importing into databases etc.

Copyright still belongs to them.

Files you may be interested in:

• words.txt contains all words.
• words_alpha.txt contains only [[:alpha:]] words (words that only have letters, no numbers or symbols). If you want a quick solution choose this.
• words_dictionary.json contains all the words from words_alpha.txt as json format. If you are using Python, you can easily load this file and use it as a dictionary for faster performance. All the words are assigned with 1 in the dictionary. See read_english_dictionary.py for example usage.