Credits

Some of the data on this site comes from other people's work. This page credits it and reproduces the licences it was shared under.

The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary

The Major System games turn words into numbers by how the words sound. The pronunciations come from the Carnegie Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary (CMUdict), maintained by the Speech Group in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Each word's number was worked out from its pronunciation, and only common words were kept. No pronunciations are reproduced.

From the dictionary's README:

The Carnegie Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary, in its current and
previous versions is Copyright (C) 1993-2014 by Carnegie Mellon
University.  Use of this dictionary for any research or commercial
purpose is completely unrestricted.  If you make use of or
redistribute this material we request that you acknowledge its
origin in your descriptions.

The dictionary's licence:

Copyright (C) 1993-2015 Carnegie Mellon University. All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
are met:

1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
   notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
   The contents of this file are deemed to be source code.

2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
   notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in
   the documentation and/or other materials provided with the
   distribution.

This work was supported in part by funding from the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, the Office of Naval Research and the National
Science Foundation of the United States of America, and by member
companies of the Carnegie Mellon Sphinx Speech Consortium. We acknowledge
the contributions of many volunteers to the expansion and improvement of
this dictionary.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY ``AS IS'' AND
ANY EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO,
THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED.  IN NO EVENT SHALL CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY
NOR ITS EMPLOYEES BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL,
SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT
LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE,
DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY
THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT
(INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE
OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

To keep to common words, the list was checked against Open English WordNet 2025, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, and the SCOWL word lists. Their notices are on the word list credits page.

Constellations and star names

Star Charts draws the 88 constellations from the star map data of d3-celestial by Olaf Frohn. Its constellation figures follow the charts made by the IAU and Sky & Telescope magazine (Roger Sinnott & Rick Fienberg), and its star positions and magnitudes come from XHIP: An Extended Hipparcos Compilation (Anderson and Francis, 2012), through VizieR. Figures with more than twelve stars were cut down to their brightest, and each was redrawn to fit a small square.

d3-celestial's licence:

Copyright (c) 2015, Olaf Frohn
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

3. Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

The names of bright stars, such as Betelgeuse and Vega, are from the IAU Catalog of Star Names (IAU-CSN), the version of 4 April 2022, by the IAU Working Group on Star Names (WGSN), licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. The IAU does not endorse this site.