Tag Archives: lexicon

A simple search utility

I made a small utility program meant to search for English words that have particular phonological properties. For example, you could use it to find words that have a long vowel followed by a coda obstruent. It’s not really all that powerful, but it’s flexible (you can make up your own natural classes) and I think it’s also very easy to use.

The phonological dictionary employed consists of all the words in the CMU database that have a CELEX frequency of at least one.

I used the program in a graduate course I just taught on English Phonology to retest the phonological generalizations proposed in the research literature on English.

Download here.  Windows only (sorry).

Bruce Hayes, UCLA

P.S. to commenters: surely there are other such programs available and I would be curious to know about them.