COHERENT manpages
This page displays the COHERENT manpage for spell [Find spelling errors].
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spell -- Command Find spelling errors spell [-a][-b][file ...] spell builds a set of unique words from a document contained in each input file, or the standard input if none. It writes a list of words believed to be misspelled onto the standard output. spell should normally be invoked with the document in the form of the input to the text formatter nroff rather than the output. spell deletes control information to the formatter by invoking deroff. The default dictionary is for American spelling of English. The -a option specifies this dictionary explicitly. Under the -b option, British spelling is checked. This accepts favour, fibre, and travelled rather than the American spellings favor, fiber, and traveled for the same words. Words ending in ize are also accepted when ending in ise (e.g., digitize, digitise). The dictionary has a reasonably complete coverage of proper names as well as technical terms in certain fields. However, it covers some fields (e.g., computer science) better than others (e.g., medicine). Looking up a Word The COHERENT command look reads spell's dictionaries to find words that resemble a fraction of a word that you type. For example, the command look consider returns the following to the standard output: consider# considerable considerably considerate considerately consideration# considered considering The `#' indicates a possible plural form by adding `s' to the end of the word. This lets you check the spelling of a word without having to enter the word into a file and run spell on it. Files /usr/dict/clista -- Compressed American dictionary /usr/dict/clistb -- Compressed British dictionary /usr/dict/spellhist -- History file for dictionary maintainer /usr/lib/spell See Also commands, deroff, look, nroff, sort, typo Notes Dictionaries are not provided for languages other than English. No dictionary can be complete. You must add new words to the dictionary to ensure that it fully meets your needs. Obscure words (such as opcodes, variable names, etc.) are flagged as spelling errors. Because the data files required for spell are quite large, they might not be installed onto systems with limited disk space. As a result, the command might not work as expected on all systems.