english thesaurus and dictionary

[Tim Churches]

Bob Roberts wrote:
> 
> I want to incorporate an english thesaurus and dictionary into my
> application.  Does anybody know of freely available thesauri and
> dictionaries that I could use?

Have a look at Oliver Steele's PyWordNet Python interface to WordNet at
http://pywordnet.sourceforge.net

As Oliver notes, WordNet  (see http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/ ) is
a lexical database of word meanings and lexical relationships (including
synonyms, hyponyms etc), so it can be used as a dictionary and
thesaurus, although it does much more. The WordNet database is very
extensive, though - it might be overkill in some circumstances. Both
WordNet and PyWordNet have free, open source licenses.

Tim C