aspell sucks: Dismal Vocabulary Size
The unix aspell is really bad. So many common words it doesn't know. Here's a list i've added. Add the following to the file ~/.aspell.en.pws
personal_ws-1.1 en 11 backtick meritable utopian programable employability downloadable thru heterogeneousness euphemized miscommunication login immersive fandom proselytization youngling microcephalic endianness pinky natively liers chantable screenshots lol blockquote exemplarily programer's programers neuroscientist lookup exposit hotkey blocky builtin ubiquitousness screenshot weblog programer subfolders superset datatype keybinding other's malware toruses polytope combinatorics incenter automata Calculational regex regex's Logitech ErgoEmacs FSF's Cygwin unix Solaris Googlers Erlang Mathematica Mathematica's OCaml Scala perl's JScript newLISP Clojure perl elisp javascript JavaScript MySQL Prolog PowerShell PHP LaTeX emacs emacs's unixes linux Unixers unixers Ctrl Picasa PhotoShop Xah
this list i only recently compiled, about a month's worth casual adding words from my own writings. (I started to use spell checking heavily because emacs 24 made spell checking 25 times faster on Windows, bringing it to the same speed as emacs for linux. [see New Features in Emacs 24])
many of the words are very common words. How hard is it to add these words to the main dictionary? This is 2012, not 1989.
while writing this page, i took a trip to aspell home page http://aspell.net/ (woot, “aspell” itself is not in its dict.) It turns out, aspell is still alive. Its author, Kevin Atkinson, actually wrote a piece in 2011 about its status and how to move aspell forward.
[Aspell's Future By Kevin Atkinson. At http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/aspell-devel/2011-09/msg00000.html , accessed on 2012-04-15 ]
lol. He suggested, that the open source world should all move to Enchant, and have aspell and hunspell become a plugin. (Enchant is a meta-spell-checker, a wrapper to multiple spell-checking engines)
yeah right, beg a edict to the open source world. It'll work when pigs fly.
and, use a meta spell checker as solution?? That's like, lets use a meta search engine. Even better, let's use a meta-meta-engine!
To get people to use aspell is really simple. Just add damn common words. Seriously, words like {backtick, login, immersive, fandom, youngling, endianness, lookup, ubiquitousness, malware}, are not there? Add them to specialized dictionary if you want. It's trivial to compile specialized lingoes these days. Make it work out of the box. And, don't worry about multiple languages or multiple features. Stick with one, English. Make that work better than other spell-checkers. Add specialized dictionaries. For example, computing, add math jargons, internet slang, chatspeak, lol, woot, leet!
How's Google Chrome and Firefox Doing?
out of curiosity, i pasted the words into Google Chrome for comparison. In the following list, those marked by a bullet “•” passes the spell checker in Google Chrome. Those marked by diamond “◇” passes Firefox spell checker. This is as of .
backtick meritable utopian ◇ programable employability • downloadable ◇ • thru ◇ heterogeneousness euphemized miscommunication ◇ login immersive fandom proselytization youngling microcephalic endianness pinky ◇ natively ◇ liers chantable screenshots ◇ lol blockquote exemplarily programer's ◇ programers ◇ neuroscientist lookup exposit hotkey blocky builtin ubiquitousness • screenshot ◇ • weblog ◇ programer ◇ subfolders superset • datatype keybinding • other's malware toruses polytope combinatorics incenter automata Calculational regex regex's • Logitech ◇ ErgoEmacs • FSF's Cygwin unix • Solaris ◇ Googlers Erlang Mathematica Mathematica's OCaml Scala perl's JScript newLISP Clojure perl elisp javascript • JavaScript ◇ • MySQL ◇ Prolog ◇ PowerShell PHP LaTeX emacs emacs's unixes linux Unixers unixers • Ctrl Picasa PhotoShop Xah
Better, but still missing lots.
Addendum: i emailed Kevin Atkinson http://kevin.atkinson.dhs.org/ about my complaint. He was kind to inform me that i was using a older version of dictionary. I've updated and edited this page to latest dictionary. The report on this page reflects english dictionary “7.1.0-1” and aspell “0.60.6.1”. These are the current version as of .
You can get my current personal aspell file at aspell_vocabulary_aspell_en_pws.txt .