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1. Peter Harvey March 6th, 2009 23:15 :

   This list is utter rubbish.

2. Andreas March 9th, 2009 09:34 :

   Hi Peter,
   thanks for your comment. We’d appreciate some constructive crticism. Why don’t you like it exactly?

   Best,
   Andreas

3. Peter Harvey March 9th, 2009 19:23 :

   I apologise for the abrupt tone of my comment but I am at a loss to see what purpose this list serves, why it should be published, who might find it useful, or indeed why anyone should bother to compile it in the first place – unless it is a joke list of odd words.

   Abide has two forms for two different meanings: abided and abode are completely different.

   Aby is marked by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as archaic.

   Alight has alighted in the past not alit, at least in English of any interest to foreign learners (two quotations only in the OED, 1818 & 1849; and only one in the British National Corpus (BNC)). Lit is perfectly acceptable as the past of light, but that is different.

   Backbite is a phrasal verb: bite back. At least, the OED has few examples of backbite as a compound, and no modern ones. The participial form backbiting is found, and is the only form recognised by the Concise Oxford Dictionary (COD). The BNC has only one example, and that is a rhetorical and rather strange ‘bicker and backbite’.

   Backfit is unknown to the OED, COD and BNC.

   Bedight is marked in the OED as ‘Now only poetical’; the most recent examples are from nineteenth-century romantic poetry. COD marks it as archaic. The BNC has no record of it.

4. Andreas March 9th, 2009 19:38 :

   Hi Peter,
   thanks for your feedback. We compiled the list in preparation of adding the irregular verb forms to our bab.la dictionaries (non-native English speakers requested this function). Since it took us some time to find all irregular verbs we thought we share this list with whoever might be interested. I understand that about half the words (or even more!) are used infrequently but our goal was to compile a list as comprehensive as possible.

   Hope this clear things up a bit.

   Best,
   Andreas

5. Peter Harvey March 9th, 2009 20:00 :

   But you’ll confuse people. If you’re looking for a passive list of acceptable forms, that’s one thing (except for the ones that don’t exist) though you will simply never achieve it; for example, you include negative forms but there are potential almost as many of those as of the verbs themselves. And, for example, while it is true that wrought is a past form of work, that fact is known only to language specialists! Very few native speakers who talk of wrought iron or being overwrought actually realise that they are using a form of the verb work; they are not simple alternatives like wet/wetted. You’ve also got some adjectival past particles (eg typewritten, winterfed, wiredrawn) that have no real use as finite verbs.

   Without knowing how your dictionaries work, and what your parameters and goals are, I can’t advise you further but I think that you’re going abut it wrong. I think that spell-checkers use language algorithms rather than simple lists. Email me and we’ll see if anything can be done.

   Best wishes,

   Peter

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