SCOWLv2 (temporary name, see #465) is a SQLite database (scowl.db) and human-readable text file (scowl.txt) of basic information on English words. The text file can be converted to and from the SQLite database via the libscowl Python module. The database contains information on how common a word is, differences in spelling between the different dialects of English, variant information, and (basic) part-of-speech and inflection information.

The primary purpose of the database is to allow the creation of high-quality spellchecker dictionaries for most dialects of English. The dictionary creation can be customized to suit your specific needs.

Premade dictionaries are available for Hunspell, Aspell, and as plain wordlists. If none of those dictionaries are suitable for your needs a simple web app is available to create a customized wordlist.

The database also contains fairly comprehensive information on the spelling differences between the various dialects of English (current American, British, British (OED), Canadian, and Australian). This includes marking of variant spellings within a dialect.

SCOWLv2 is still a work in progress. Official speller dictionaries generated from SCOWL will be released periodically. However, an official release of SCOWL itself will not be created until things stabilize. If you wish to use SCOWL directly, it is best you check out the source from Git at https://github.com/en-wl/wordlist.

The wordlist-diff repo can be used to help determine which commit introduced or removed words. It contains a generated version of scowl.txt and plain wordlist versions of the Hunspell dictionaries.