Question: I have a WordNet synset offset (for example `id="n#05576222"`). Given this offset, how can I get the synset using Python?

Answer: 
As of NLTK 3.2.3, there's a public method for doing this:

```
wordnet.synset_from_pos_and_offset(pos, offset)

```

In earlier versions you can use:

```
wordnet._synset_from_pos_and_offset(pos, offset)

```

This returns a synset based on it's POS and offest ID. I think this method is only available in NLTK 3.0 but I'm not sure.

Example:

```
from nltk.corpus import wordnet as wn
wn.synset_from_pos_and_offset('n',4543158)
>> Synset('wagon.n.01')

```
Other than using NLTK, another option would be to use the .tab file from the `Open Multilingual WordNet` <http://compling.hss.ntu.edu.sg/omw/> for the Princeton WordNet. Normally i used the recipe below to access wordnet as a dictionary with offset as the key and `;` delimited strings as a values:

```
# Gets first instance of matching key given a value and a dictionary.    
def getKey(dic, value):
  return [k for k,v.split(";") in dic.items() if v in value]

# Read Open Multi WN's .tab file
def readWNfile(wnfile, option="ss"):
  reader = codecs.open(wnfile, "r", "utf8").readlines()
  wn = {}
  for l in reader:
    if l[0] == "#": continue
    if option=="ss":
      k = l.split("\t")[0] #ss as key
      v = l.split("\t")[2][:-1] #word
    else:
      v = l.split("\t")[0] #ss as value
      k = l.split("\t")[2][:-1] #word as key
    try:
      temp = wn[k]
      wn[k] = temp + ";" + v
    except KeyError:
      wn[k] = v  
  return wn

princetonWN = readWNfile('wn-data-eng.tab')
offset = "n#05576222"
offset = offset.split('#')[1]+'-'+ offset.split('#')[0]

print princetonWN.split(";")
print getKey('heatstroke')

```