LITMIR.BIZ

       Wishing to have an extensive list of Synonyms and Antonyms for another project, I settled on Fallows’ amazing publication. However, I could not find an OCR text which was clear of the many OCR-scan errors. I did my own OCR, which joined many of the line-end hyphenated words automatically, but which still resulted in a very large number of nearly identical (to other OCR scans) errors. This is probably not the fault of the OCR software, but rather of the quality of the 19th Century source type and ink, which tended to be far from crisp. The software was not entirely perfect though and it would often invert n and u, or render either of those letters as ii, and render i as l (lower case L). R and K were regularly mixed, so ROCK could be rendered as KOCR–if it managed to get the circular letters correct. Just one example of variation is to be found in the rendering of the coded abbreviation for SYNONYM, ‘SYN.’ It might be rendered with a period, comma, both or none; and some of these variations were recorded: \ BTH \ 2vN. \ 8_vs. \ BYN, \ KYN. \ PYN. \ RYN. \ SIN, \ Srn. \ STIC. \ STK. \ STN. \ STN., \ STW. \ SVN_ \ SXN. \ SY.V. \ SY:. \ SYH. \ SYK. \ SYN, \ Syn, \ SYN. \ SYN. \ SYN._ \ SYS,. \ SYS. \ SYW. \ SYX\. and \ YX\. ! I know! Grrr!

       Anyhow, with lots of rekeying, lots of rules to fix as many as aberrations as possible, and employing a personal digital dictionary of over 600,000 words, I checked many of the fragments and verified that the OCR scanner had done very well, in fact. Those fragments which eventually could not be distinguished by eye or logic were left ‘as is’ and bracketed thus: {[unreadable]?}. When replaced into the text in their correct sequence, some of those could be deduced from their context, but I will leave that for the next editor (possibly you, dear reader.) The dictionary is not perfect or complete, and it did not distinguish n-Grams which are clearly adequate language. Having corrected many broken words, I re-sorted them back into original order, added ‘KEY:’ to the principal, and pasted the lot to the Word Processor (below) for study, uploading and further corrections.

       I did, in fact, Google several scores of unrecognised but right-looking words and found many were accurate though out of common use in today’s English. Victorian English vocab was quite extensive. Did Fallows do a dictionary of word meanings (I wish)?

      · Serendip Clip, Nowra, NSW, Australia, February 2016.