How to check for English words in a list

Question

I'm trying to check and see if a word is an English word. Not sure if this is the best way to do it, any advice? It doesn't want to work.

from nltk import wordnet

word_to_test = input("Please enter a word: ")
if not wordnet.synsets(word_to_test):
    print("FALSE")
    #not english word
else:
    print("TRUE")

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"It doesn't want to work" is not a problem specification. Your posted code doesn't ran as given: at least one syntax error, and it stalls awaiting input. — Prune, Sep 25 '19 at 16:26
I tried running the code and got `AttributeError: module 'nltk.stem.wordnet' has no attribute 'synsets'` — EuRBamarth, Sep 25 '19 at 16:27
Possible duplicate of [How to check if a word is an English word with Python?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3788870/how-to-check-if-a-word-is-an-english-word-with-python) — Trenton McKinney, Sep 25 '19 at 16:43
The `enchant` package mentioned in the possible duplicate, is not longer maintained, however, there are other methods mentioned as well. — Trenton McKinney, Sep 25 '19 at 17:00

Trenton McKinney · Accepted Answer · 2019-09-25T16:59:43.160

Use the following code:

from nltk.corpus import wordnet with wordnet.synsets did not successfully identify English words.
- All of the words in word_list identified as True
Successfully identifying an English word, depends on the dictionary in use.

from nltk.corpus import words

def check_words(word_list: list):
    for word in word_list:
        print(word in words.words())

word_list = ['poisson', 'stark', 'nihongo', 'abstract', 'pedo']

Output:

check_words(word_list)

False
True
False
True
False

How to check for English words in a list

1 Answers1

Use the following code:

Output: