English Contractions Dictionary

A comprehensive dictionary of English contractions and their expansions, ranging from standard contractions to archaic and dialectal forms. The scope column distinguishes between basic everyday contractions (scope "basic", 70 entries from qdapDictionaries) and extended contractions (scope "extended", covering archaic second-person forms, dialect reductions, dropped-g progressives, apocopic forms, and informal variants from textnorm/ECHNAE).

Format

A data frame with 550 rows and 6 variables.

Source

qdapDictionaries (GPL-2), textnorm/ECHNAE, curated/textnorm

Details

Note: 10 contraction forms appear in more than one row because they belong to different subcategories or sources (e.g., the contraction d prefixed with an apostrophe appears as both contraction and would_had_contraction). The combination of form + subcategory uniquely identifies each entry.

Variables

• form. the contracted form (e.g., "don't", "bear'st", "gonna")

• replacement. the expanded form (e.g., "do not", "bearest", "going to")

• category. type of contraction (negation, perfect, conditional, future, progressive, is_or_has_or_possessive, first_person, apocopic, archaic_second_person, dialect_reduction, dropped_g, informal, contraction_other)

• subcategory. finer-grained classification (e.g., apostrophe_st, apocopic, n_reduction)

• scope. "basic" for the original 70 entries, "extended" for expanded coverage

• source. data source attribution