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From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: spell and /usr/dict/words.
Message-ID: <13668@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 28 Aug 90 01:30:08 GMT
References: <7385@star.cs.vu.nl> <517@sun13.scri.fsu.edu>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 8

In article <517@sun13.scri.fsu.edu> mayne@VSSERV.SCRI.FSU.EDU (William (Bill) Mayne) writes:
>... For relatively long strings there are many hash collisions which
>cause nonwords to be accepted.

Yes, and if there are too many arcane-but-correct spellings in the word
list that "spell" uses, many misspellings will not be detected because
the misspelling matches some arcane, unintended word.  When it comes to
"spell", bigger is definitely not better.