I would like to make an auto-completion tool for people who are don't type very well, like what exists on phones. So I do not need just a dictionary but a list of all words, like all conjugations of verbs and all word variants (plural, gender). I can use use the wiktionary's word frequency list, but it is not as complete as I would like. Yet, the frequency sorting property is interesting for me.
So should I look for something else or should I start with what I have?
If you really just need all possible spellings, then I would suggest downloading Google N-Grams for N=1 (single words). These are individual words/strings coming from books in the French language. You also have the year, the count in that book, and the part of speech, if available. From this data you can create frequency lists of all unique spellings.
http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.html
The individual files are quite large. For example, a single file, googlebooks-fre-all-1gram-20120701-a.gz is 194 MB compressed, and 1.0 GB uncompressed. All full of single words.
The structure is quite simple
ngram TAB year TAB match_count TAB volume_count NEWLINE
So an actual line in the 1-gram files will look like this:
âutre_ADJ 1794 1 1
where _ADJ defines the part of speech.
License is Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.
p.s. I'm a big fan of Python's Collections library for the task of counting frequency of something too large to read at once. See here for example of counting characters. There is also a Python N-gram downloader package, but in this case I prefer to get the files manually (since they are needed to be downloaded only once).
I'm no expert on this topic, but I believe that I have suggestion to make.
Start with the wiktionary word frequency list that is "not as complete as you would like," because it is still your best starting point.
Then find and fix the (occasional) "holes" after the fact.
I have found the perfect dataset for me: http://www.lexique.org/
Word are extracted from books and movies subtitles. It contains about 140,000 words.
https://grammalecte.net/ has a decent word list (over 450k words)
You can check the list at http://grammalecte.net:8080/file?name=lexicons/French.lex&ci=tip
The project Wiktextract has extracted all words from Wiktionary, for the French words the English and French Wiktionary data is probably most interesting. Look here: https://kaikki.org/dictionary/rawdata.html and https://kaikki.org/dictionary/French/.
For word frequency filtering (should it be necessary) I can always recommend the wordfreq Python library, it also supports French.
