checking words in a dictionary

Question

I need to determine if an unknown 5 or 6 letter string is a valid word, i.e. is in the dictionary. I could submit the string/word to an online dictionary, but I need to check this string/word, which will be different each time, for about 100 to 150 times. This seems to be a bit time consuming.

My next thought would be to try to get a dictionary program of my own. It would need to be in Java as my program is written in Java. Does the Java API already have a class for doing this? Can I get a descent one that someone has already coded, and all I have to do is submit the string/word to it?

My program is not being used for spell checking. I want to write a program for unscrambling the Jumbled Word Puzzles when I get stuck on a scrambled word. Thanks for your suggestions.

Solution 1

You could use one of the open source dictionaries and load it into a database: ftp://ftp.cerias.purdue.edu/pub/dict/ and ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/wordlists/

Solution 2

For scrambled words, you might want to look at the Jumble algorithm, an implementation of which is seen here.

Solution 3

If you don't need spell checking this would be really easy. Just load all your words into a HashSet and then check to see if that set contains the word you want to test. There are tons of word lists available.

If you do need a spell checker, then check out aspell or other free APIs.