Classic Shell Scripting

Improving ispell and aspell

Unix spell supports several options, most of which are not helpful for day-to-day use. One exception is the -b option, which causes spell to prefer British spelling: "centre" instead of "center," "colour" instead of "color," and so on.^[4] See the manual page for the other options.

One nice feature is that you can provide your own local spelling list of valid words. For example, it often happens that there may be words from a particular discipline that are spelled correctly, but that are not in spell's dictionary (for example, "POSIX"). You can create, and over time maintain, your own list of valid but unusual words, and then use this list when running spell. You indicate the pathname to the local spelling list by supplying it before the file to be checked, and by preceding it with a + character:

spell +/usr/local/lib/local.words myfile > myfile.errs

Private Spelling Dictionaries

We feel that it is an important Best Practice to have a private spelling dictionary for every document that you write: a common one for many documents is not useful because the vocabulary becomes too big and errors are likely to be hidden: "syzygy" might be correct in a math paper, but in a novel, it perhaps ought to have been "soggy." We have found, based on a several-million-line corpus of technical text with associated spelling dictionaries, that there tends to be about one spelling exception every six lines. This tells us that spelling exceptions are common and are worth the ...