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 and distributed as a single zip file. After extraction, the vocabulary files included with this product are in ordinary ASCII format with CRLF (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 not mark the accent on the initial 'e'.
Moby Thesaurus is the largest and most comprehensive thesaurus data source in English available for commercial use. This second edition has been thoroughly revised adding more than 5,000 root words (to total more than 30,000) with an additional million synonyms and related terms (to total more than 2.5 million synonyms and related terms). Although this thesaurus is provided in a very simple ASCII format suitable to viewing, editing, and automatic parsing, most users will consider reformatting schemes to represent the data in a more economical form, such as table of related terms whose index can be shared by many roots. This is roughly the technique used by the thesaurus in print form that has the large index coupled with the synonyms under abstract (and arbitrary) headings in the front matter. Tables of related terms can be stored in, for example, LZ compressed form until actually required by the application. Combining such schemes could easily reduce the storage requirement of this data by an order of magnitude or more. The supplementary file, roget13a.txt, provides a small thesaurus already organized in this form that you may wish to use as a guide when developing your own categories of synonyms. Also, of course, uncommon words can be stripped out according to the developer's criterion, keeping only the core and most oftenly used information. Once unarchived, the database format is flat-file ASCII: each record (delimited from other records with a terminal carriage return/linefeed [ASCII 13/10] character) is of the form:
(In this example, the root word is 'frill', which is always the first word of the list. The synonyms and related words are listed in ASCII alphabetical order after the root. Each entry, including the root, is followed by a comma. The last entry in a record is followed by a carriage return/linefeed [ASCII 13/10].)