wordnet-lookup 1.2.6

Static Dictionaries for Rapid Wordnet Lookups

WordNet Lookup

Is this token a word? O(1) answer. No setup. No dependencies.

A simple question deserves a simple answer. This library gives you instant yes/no validation against 88,000 common English words from the Princeton WordNet lexicon.

Quick Start

pip install wordnet-lookup

from wordnet_lookup import is_wordnet_term

# That's it. Start validating.
is_wordnet_term('alpha')        # True
is_wordnet_term('waddling')     # True
is_wordnet_term('myxovirus')    # True
is_wordnet_term('nonexistent')  # False

# Handles plurals automatically
is_wordnet_term('computers')    # True

# Case insensitive
is_wordnet_term('ALPHA')        # True

Features

• Zero Dependencies - Pure Python, no external packages
• Zero I/O - No filesystem access, no database queries
• Zero Setup - No corpus downloads or configuration
• Microsecond Lookups - O(1) dictionary access
• Smart Plurals - Automatically checks singular forms
• Simple API - One function does it all

The Problem This Solves

In NLP, you frequently need to answer the question: "Is this token a real word?"

Not "what does it mean?" Not "give me synonyms." Just: is this a word?

is_wordnet_term('computer')	is_wordnet_term('asdfgh')
True	False

That's it. O(1) response. No ambiguity.

Why WordNet?

WordNet isn't the OED (too academic). It's not Urban Dictionary (too ephemeral). It's not a web scrape (too noisy).

It's a curated lexicon of ~88,000 common English words maintained by Princeton linguists. The kind of words that appear in newspapers, textbooks, and everyday conversation. If a token passes the WordNet test, you can be confident it's a legitimate, widely-recognized English word.

When to Use This

• Tokenization filtering: Keep real words, discard garbage
• Input validation: Reject nonsense in user input
• NLP preprocessing: Filter candidates before expensive operations
• Spell-check pre-filtering: Quick reject obvious non-words before fuzzy matching
• Data cleaning: Identify malformed or corrupted text

What This Doesn't Do

• No definitions, synonyms, or semantic relationships (use spaCy for that)
• No slang, proper nouns, or recent coinages (WordNet is from 2006)
• No spell-checking or suggestions (just yes/no)

Documentation

For detailed usage, performance benchmarks, implementation details, and advanced features, see the API Documentation.

Development

git clone https://github.com/craigtrim/wordnet-lookup.git
cd wordnet-lookup
make all      # Full build pipeline

See API Documentation for detailed development information.

License

This package is dual-licensed:

• Software: MIT License
• WordNet Data: Princeton WordNet License

See LICENSE for complete terms.

Attribution

This package contains data derived from Princeton WordNet 3.0 (2006):

WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

Note: This is a static snapshot of WordNet 3.0. The data is not automatically updated with newer WordNet releases.

See Also

• bnc-lookup - Similar O(1) lookup using the British National Corpus (BNC)

Links

• Repository: github.com/craigtrim/wordnet-lookup
• PyPI: pypi.org/project/wordnet-lookup
• WordNet: wordnet.princeton.edu
• Author: Craig Trim ([e-mail])