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I am looking for a complete set of all possible English words and phrases (i.e. 'fire', 'fire up', 'fire ant', 'under fire'). Actually, I need it for parsing online dictionary.

The best thing i found was standard words file in my GNU/Linux system. It's pretty neat in terms of consistency and contains about 100k words (or 40k excluding plurals), but it has no two-word phrases with adpositions, such as 'hold on'.

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    deriving a complete list of all possible English phrases (collocations) is a open problem. I have seen current research presentations on it just last week.
    – Frames Catherine White
    Commented Apr 14, 2016 at 9:25
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    There is a consensus among linguists that there is no upper bound on the number of grammatical phrases in any given human language. The apparent universal property of syntactic recursion is cited in support of this position; though see recent work on the Pirahã language for counter evidence.
    – Brandon Loudermilk
    Commented Apr 15, 2016 at 11:13

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Try http://en.wiktionary.org – it's free and it has a lot of idioms and phrases.

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  • Well, I haven't think if Wiktionary would be a good solution until I checked it out. BTW, I just parsed 268748 words and phrases from it. More than on another good site suggested in question #741003.
    – dabessmayne
    Commented Jun 15, 2015 at 10:31
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Also look at this english word list as well this this and this phrase lists.

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Consider the Google N-grams data, which is based on book content:

In your case, 2-to-5 ngrams refer to phrases, although only frequent n-grams are stable ones. Like, "under fire" has more mentions than "green fire", so it's a "phrase.

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