SPELL(1) | General Commands Manual | SPELL(1) |
spell
— find
spelling errors
spell |
[-biltvx ] [-d
list] [-h
spellhist] [-m
a | e |
l | m |
s] [-s
list] [+extra_list]
[file ...] |
spell
collects words from the named
documents and looks them up in a spelling list. Words that neither occur
among nor are derivable (by applying certain inflections, prefixes or
suffixes) from words in the spelling list are printed on the standard
output.
If no files are named, words are collected from the standard
input. spell
ignores most troff, tbl, eqn, and pic
constructions. Copies of all output may be accumulated in the history file,
if one is specified.
By default, spell
(like
deroff(1)) follows chains of
included files (“.so” and “.nx” commands).
The default spelling list is based on Webster's Second
International dictionary and should be fairly complete. Words that appear in
the “stop list” are immediately flagged as misspellings,
regardless of whether or not they exist in one of the word lists. This helps
filter out misspellings (e.g. thier=thy-y+ier) that would otherwise pass.
Additionally, the british file is also used as a
stop list unless the -b
option is specified.
Site administrators may add words to the local word list, /usr/local/share/dict/words or the local stop list, /usr/local/share/dict/stop.
All word (and stop) lists must be sorted in lexicographical order
with case folded. The simplest way to achieve this is to use “sort
-df”. If the word files are incorrectly sorted,
spell
will not be able to operate correctly.
The options are as follows:
-b
-ise
in words like
standardise,
Fowler and the OED to the contrary notwithstanding. In this mode, American
variants of words are added to the stop list.-d
list-h
spellhistwho -m
is appended to the history file after the
list of misspelled words.-i
-l
-m
-m
description in
deroff(1) for details.-s
list-t
-v
-x
The spell
command first appeared in
Version 5 AT&T UNIX and has been
available since OpenBSD 3.1.
Unlike historic versions, the OpenBSD
spell
command does not use hashed word files.
Instead, it uses lexicographically sorted files and the same technique as
look(1).
The spelling list lacks many technical terms; new installations will probably wish to monitor the output for several months to gather local additions.
British spelling was done by an American.
In -x
mode it would be nicer if the stems
were grouped with the appropriate word.
February 8, 2020 | OpenBSD-7.0 |