Any interest in a word dictionary API?

A challenge of any word game is dictionary use and validation. At the beginning of summer I put together bestwordplay.com, which is basically an anagraming tool with a dictionary back end -- if you explore around a minute there, you will get the idea.

My first game project I am making AJAX queries to configure game data such as letter frequency for random generation and word sets. The possibilities are many. Word validation, custom result sets, word and letter frequency analysis, boggle solving, anagraming, off the top of my head... The dictionaries could be varied, too. public domain 'Official Word Lists', common English, SOWPODS (which is cc licensed) , are readily available.

It occurred to me that something like this might be very useful to open up to other devs. (or I may just be an extreme word nerd.) ... I have not given much thought beyond this. So any feedback here is appreciated.

I found C2 because of my fascination with words and anagrams and I basically just wanted to make fun games to quiz myself and learn new anagrams for word gaming. C2 and 'game' dev is new to me, but I have been an owner of a small networking and hosting company for 18 years now, and am very familiar with database technologies.... and playing word games <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":-)" title="Smile">

If you want to test, I have a demo anagram query here: http://bestwordplay.com/demoGetanagrams ... tters=EAST -- you can change the letters value and see your own results.

Just as I suspected ... I'm a nerd!

Other than the ability to get existing lists, or dictionaries, an api would be a bit of overkill as you can do quite a lot of generation in C2 already.

Especially since we now have regex.

I like your site.. pretty cool.. and a non obvious cheat for Scrabble!

Sorry for the late reply -- I thought I would get a notice of some sort if someone posted in my thread... and I just looked.

newt good point, although regex will still be slow against a properly indexed database (and what exactly would your regex be, say, to find two or more 'A's and an 'E' anywhere in any word? -- here is my run against 45000 words ... so there might be some speed/simplicity. And size. but yeah, I was just thinking out loud, very well could be overkill...

I've yet to try more than a few hundred words at a time in C2, although I saw a post where someone was running with a 35K word set with no worries. And I personally found C2 is near instant with partial word matches for my in game 'hints'. I have a prototype of my C2 game here.

The smaller full English dictionary (OWL) is around 220K words. A lot of word info, such as prefixes and suffixes, anagrams are separate related fields in my db, which makes it very quick. I may play around with putting this stuff in arrays in C2 and see how it runs (some of the fastest stuff I've see was done with javascript(!) ... btw, I'm by no means a pro dev, so I may not know what I'm talking about -- it's just a newly discovered hobby for now.

jobel - thanks! ... I prefer to think of it as a 'training tool' instead of cheat ...

Cheers!