This is the vocabulary: every verb, noun, adjective, adverb and direction the parser understands, stored alphabetically, 356 entries in all. It is also used by the printer, so the same words appear in room descriptions and messages.

Each word is stored with one byte per letter. The low five bits of each byte hold the letter (1=A, 2=B ... 26=Z, 0=no letter). From the third byte onwards, bit 7 set means 'this is the last letter of the word'. Words shorter than three letters are padded with a byte whose letter bits are 0 and whose bit 7 is set (so TO is stored as T, O, $80).

Bits 5 and 6 of the FIRST TWO bytes are not part of the letters: together they give the word's class, which the tokeniser (6E8E, at 6F12) assembles into a single byte: bit 6 of byte 0 becomes bit 7, bit 5 of byte 0 becomes bit 6, bit 6 of byte 1 becomes bit 5, and bit 5 of byte 1 becomes bit 4. The classes are:

Class	Meaning	Examples
$00	adverb	CAREFULLY, QUICKLY, VICIOUSLY, SOFTLY
$10	'in' preposition	IN, INTO
$20	direction	NORTH, EAST, UP, DOWN, NE
$30	verb	ATTACK, TAKE, CLIMB, EXAMINE, OPEN, SAY
$40	movement verb	GO, RUN
$50	noun	SWORD, THORIN, DOOR, KEY, BARREL
$60	adjective	CURIOUS, LARGE, GREEN, DARK
$70	preposition	AT, WITH, TO, ON, THROUGH
$80	article or filler	A, AN, THE, IS, THAT
$90	special word	ALL, EXCEPT, IT, HELP, SAVE, LOAD, PRINT, QUIT
$A0	AND	AND (a comma produces the same class)
$B0	THEN	THEN (a full stop produces the same class)

SYNONYMS: if bit 6 of a word's LAST byte is set, the word is a synonym and is followed by two extra bytes: the offset from 6000 of the word it stands for. The tokeniser silently replaces the synonym with that word, so the rest of the game never sees it. There are 29 synonyms, and they explain a lot about how the game behaves: HIT, KILL, CAPTURE, SLASH and SLICE all become ATTACK; BREAK and SMASH become STRIKE; GET, LIFT and STEAL become TAKE; PICK becomes CARRY; READ becomes EXAMINE; SAY becomes TALK; EVERYTHING becomes ALL; BUT becomes EXCEPT; ME becomes YOU; I becomes INVENTORY; L and LO become LOOK; and N, S, E, W, NE, NW, SE, SW, U and D become the full direction words. So 'hit thorin' and 'kill thorin' are literally the same command as 'attack thorin'.

Everything else in the game refers to a word by its offset from 6000, as a 12-bit number. So SWORD, which starts at 6684, is referred to as $684; THORIN at 66B8 is $6B8; CAVE at 6112 is $112. The spare top four bits of those 16-bit references are used for the class or for printing flags.

The dictionary ends at $67AE with YOU; the byte at 67AF is a separator, and the second dictionary (67B0) follows.