1SPELL(1) General Commands Manual SPELL(1)
2
3
4
6 spell, spellin, spellout - find spelling errors
7
9 spell [ option ] ... [ file ] ...
10
11 /usr/src/cmd/spell/spellin [ list ]
12
13 /usr/src/cmd/spell/spellout [ -d ] list
14
16 Spell collects words from the named documents, and looks them up in a
17 spelling list. Words that neither occur among nor are derivable (by
18 applying certain inflections, prefixes or suffixes) from words in the
19 spelling list are printed on the standard output. If no files are
20 named, words are collected from the standard input.
21
22 Spell ignores most troff, tbl and eqn(1) constructions.
23
24 Under the -v option, all words not literally in the spelling list are
25 printed, and plausible derivations from spelling list words are indi‐
26 cated.
27
28 Under the -b option, British spelling is checked. Besides preferring
29 centre, colour, speciality, travelled, etc., this option insists upon
30 -ise in words like standardise, Fowler and the OED to the contrary not‐
31 withstanding.
32
33 Under the -x option, every plausible stem is printed with `=' for each
34 word.
35
36 The spelling list is based on many sources, and while more haphazard
37 than an ordinary dictionary, is also more effective in respect to
38 proper names and popular technical words. Coverage of the specialized
39 vocabularies of biology, medicine and chemistry is light.
40
41 Pertinent auxiliary files may be specified by name arguments, indicated
42 below with their default settings. Copies of all output are accumu‐
43 lated in the history file. The stop list filters out misspellings
44 (e.g. thier=thy-y+ier) that would otherwise pass.
45
46 Two routines help maintain the hash lists used by spell. Both expect a
47 list of words, one per line, from the standard input. Spellin adds the
48 words on the standard input to the preexisting list and places a new
49 list on the standard output. If no list is specified, the new list is
50 created from scratch. Spellout looks up each word in the standard
51 input and prints on the standard output those that are missing from (or
52 present on, with option -d) the hash list.
53
55 D=/usr/dict/hlist[ab]: hashed spelling lists, American & British
56 S=/usr/dict/hstop: hashed stop list
57 H=/usr/dict/spellhist: history file
58 /usr/lib/spell
59 deroff(1), sort(1), tee(1), sed(1)
60
62 The spelling list's coverage is uneven; new installations will probably
63 wish to monitor the output for several months to gather local addi‐
64 tions.
65 British spelling was done by an American.
66
67
68
69 SPELL(1)