Where can I download a free, text-rich dataset?

I want to do a bit of lightweight testing and bench-marking for full-text search, so the dataset should have the qualitie开发者_C百科s:

• 10,000 - 100,000 records.
• good dispersion of English words.
• In CSV or Excel format--i.e. I don't want to access it via API.

Something like books or movies with title and description fields would be perfect. I browsed the UCI Machine Learning Repo, but it was too number-oriented.

You can try
- CKAN
- or search for "Open Data"

Or, see Tim Berners-Lee discussing a quick survey of a few Open Data sets.

If you do not find one, you can create one using the LOREM IPSUM generator

T-SQL equivalent of =rand()

You can also get the full StackOverflow data dump

https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creative-commons-data-dump/

Use the Gutenberg Project. You have access to thousands of English book in plain text. That's what I've used once and was happy with it.