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From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: spell and /usr/dict/words.
Message-ID: <13699@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 29 Aug 90 21:39:08 GMT
References: <517@sun13.scri.fsu.edu> <13668@smoke.BRL.MIL> <1990Aug29.002759.4012@litwin.com>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 21

In article <1990Aug29.002759.4012@litwin.com> vlr@litwin.com (Vic Rice) writes:
>I just tried this on my system : SCO Opendesktop (SYSV R3.2.1). No 
>misspellings were flagged.

If the examples I cited were not flagged by your version of "spell",
then you might as well not use "spell" since it fails to report probable
misspellings.

"spell" is not intended to be like "lint", where any output at all is
considered to indicate a problem.  Rather, it is meant to present you
with a list of "questionable" words that you then manually verify.
The "local word list" (+) option of "spell" allows you to create a
selective list of words that are correct but would otherwise be
reported as "hits" by "spell"; this suffices to keep the volume of
"spell" output manageable.

"manger" should be reported by an ideal implementation of "spell",
even though it's a well-known word, due to the expectation that this is
much more likely to be a misspelling of an intended "manager" than a
correctly-spelled "manger".  Unfortunately, many "spell" word lists are
overly inclusive, thereby reducing the utility of "spell".