Lexicographic Adventures:
Rhythm and surprises in open source word lists

David Dailey and Nathaniel Zeiger
Slippery Rock University
http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/Lexico.html

Why word lists?

Why open source? 

("original expression, fixed in a tangible medium" Feist, 1991, notwithstanding, Noah Webster "invented" both the American language and US copyright law)

Whence open source word lists?

Expired copyright (problems: archaisms and OCR errors)
Public projects (problems: overbroad/uncurated sampling of corpora)

Curiosities: 

funny words
funny letters

Practicalities

Superwordlist
hyper-thesaurus
anagrams
games
interchangeable grams

Idiosyncracies

hidden rhythms