Moby (tm) Thesaurus II Documentation Notes
This documentation, the software and/or database are:
Public Domain material by grant from the author, January, 2001.
Moby (tm) Thesaurus for the MSDOS operating system is compressed anddistributed as a single zip file. After extraction, the vocabularyfiles included with this product are in ordinary ASCII format withCRLF (ASCII 13/10) delimiters.
MOBY Thesaurus II CONTENTS
This file (aaREADME.txt)
Unabridged Moby Main Thesaurus file (mthesaur.txt)
Roget 1911 (roget13a.txt)
NOTE: Accents have been stripped from words, e.g., 'etude' does notmark the accent on the initial 'e'.
Moby Thesaurus is the largest and most comprehensive thesaurus datasource in English available for commercial use. This second editionhas been thoroughly revised adding more than 5,000 root words (tototal more than 30,000) with an additional million synonyms andrelated terms (to total more than 2.5 million synonyms and relatedterms). Although this thesaurus is provided in a very simple ASCIIformat suitable to viewing, editing, and automatic parsing, mostusers will consider reformatting schemes to represent the data in amore economical form, such as table of related terms whose index canbe shared by many roots. This is roughly the technique used by thethesaurus in print form that has the large index coupled with thesynonyms under abstract (and arbitrary) headings in the front matter.Tables of related terms can be stored in, for example, LZ compressedform until actually required by the application. Combining suchschemes could easily reduce the storage requirement of this data byan order of magnitude or more. The supplementary file, roget13a.txt,provides a small thesaurus already organized in this form that youmay wish to use as a guide when developing your own categories ofsynonyms. Also, of course, uncommon words can be stripped outaccording to the developer's criterion, keeping only the core andmost oftenly used information. Once unarchived, the database formatis flat-file ASCII: each record (delimited from other records with aterminal carriage return/linefeed [ASCII 13/10] character) is of theform:
(In this example, the root word is 'frill', which is always the firstword of the list. The synonyms and related words are listed in ASCIIalphabetical order after the root. Each entry, including the root,is followed by a comma. The last entry in a record is followed by acarriage return/linefeed [ASCII 13/10].)
frill, addition, adornment, amenity, beading, beauties, bedizenment,binding, bonus, bordering, bordure, bravery, chiffon, clinquant,colors, colors of rhetoric, crease, creasing, crimp, crisp,decoration, dog-ear, double, double over, doubling, duplication,duplication of effort, duplicature, edging, elegant variation,embellishment, embroidery, enfold, expletive, extra, extra addedattraction, extra dash, extravagance, fat, featherbedding, festoons,figure, figure of speech, filigree, filling, fillip, fimbria,fimbriation, fine writing, finery, flection, flexure, floridity,floridness, flounce, flourish, floweriness, flowers of speech, flute,fold, fold over, folderol, foofaraw, frilliness, frilling, frills,frills and furbelows, fringe, frippery, froufrou, furbelow, fuss,gaiety, galloon, gather, gaudery, gewgaw, gilding, gilt, gingerbread,hem,infold, interfold, jazz, lagniappe, lap over, lapel, lappet, list,lushness, luxuriance, luxury, motif, needlessness, ornament,ornamentation, ostentation, overadornment, overlap, padding, paste,payroll padding, plait, pl