Moby Part of Speech List

This is not a book you'll read cover to cover. It's something more interesting: a monument to linguistic ambition. Compiled by Grady Ward over years of obsessive work, the Moby Part of Speech List attempts to catalog the grammatical identity of every word in the English language. Over 260,000 entries, each tagged with its part of speech using Ward's custom ASCII notation system. Originally published in the late 1980s and early 1990s, long before modern machine learning made language processing seem routine, this list was foundational infrastructure for the early internet. It powered spellcheckers, search engines, and the first generation of natural language tools. Ward, working essentially alone, created what corporations and universities couldn't or wouldn't attempt. For linguists and tech historians, this is a artifact: a personal quest to map English that became essential infrastructure for the digital age, one man's attempt to give language machine-readable form.