The Programmer's Lexicon, Volume I: The Verbs

Method names make or break abstractions: good ones communicate the intention of the method, whereas bad ones cause confusion and frustration. The task of naming is subject to the whims and idiosyncracies of the individual since programmers have little to guide them except their personal experience. By analysing method implementations taken from a corpus of Java applications, we establish the meaning of verbs in method names based on actual use. The result is an automatically generated, domain-neutral lexicon of verbs, similar to a natural language dictionary, that represents the common usages of many programmers.