ISPELL(1) General Commands Manual ISPELL(1)
NAME
ispell, buildhash, munchlist, findaffix, tryaffix, icombine, ijoin - In-
teractive spelling checking
SYNOPSIS
ispell [common-flags] [-M|-N] [-Lcontext] [-V] files
ispell [common-flags] -l
ispell [common-flags] [-f file] [-s] [-a|-A]
ispell [-d file] [-w chars] -c
ispell [-d file] [-w chars] -e[e]
ispell [-d file] -D
ispell -v[v]
common-flags:
[-t] [-n] [-H] [-o] [-b] [-x] [-B] [-C] [-P] [-m] [-S] [-d file]
[-p file] [-w chars] [-W n] [-T type] [-kname list] [-F program]
Helper programs:
buildhash [-s] dict-file affix-file hash-file
buildhash -s count affix-file
munchlist [-l aff-file] [-c conv-file] [-T suffix]
[-s hash-file] [-D] [-v] [-w chars] [files]
findaffix [-p|-s] [-f] [-c] [-m min] [-M max] [-e elim]
[-t tabchar] [-l low] [files]
tryaffix [-p|-s] [-c] expanded-file affix[+addition] ...
icombine [-T type] [-w chars] [aff-file]
ijoin [-s|-u] join-options file1 file2
DESCRIPTION
Ispell is fashioned after the spell program from ITS (called ispell on
Twenex systems.) The most common usage is "ispell filename". In this
case, ispell will display each word which does not appear in the dictio-
nary at the top of the screen and allow you to change it. If there are
"near misses" in the dictionary (words which differ by only a single
letter, a missing or extra letter, a pair of transposed letters, or a
missing space or hyphen), then they are also displayed on following
lines. As well as "near misses", ispell may display other guesses at
ways to make the word from a known root, with each guess preceded by
question marks. Finally, the line containing the word and the previous
line are printed at the bottom of the screen. If your terminal can dis-
play in reverse video, the word itself is highlighted. You have the op-
tion of replacing the word completely, or choosing one of the suggested
words. Commands are single characters as follows (case is ignored):
R Replace the misspelled word completely.
Space Accept the word this time only.
A Accept the word for the rest of this ispell session.
I Accept the word, capitalized as it is in the file, and up-
date private dictionary.
U Accept the word, and add an uncapitalized (actually, all
lower-case) version to the private dictionary.
0–n Replace with one of the suggested words.
L Look up words in system dictionary (controlled by the
WORDS compilation option).
X Write the rest of this file, ignoring misspellings, and
start next file.
Q Exit immediately and leave the file unchanged.
! Shell escape.
^L Redraw screen.
^Z Suspend ispell.
? Give help screen.
If the -M switch is specified, a one-line mini-menu at the bottom of the
screen will summarize these options. Conversely, the -N switch may be
used to suppress the mini-menu. (The minimenu is displayed by default
if ispell was compiled with the MINIMENU option, but these two switches
will always override the default).
If the -L flag is given, the specified number is used as the number of
lines of context to be shown at the bottom of the screen (The default is
to calculate the amount of context as a certain percentage of the screen
size). The amount of context is subject to a system-imposed limit.
If the -V flag is given, characters that are not in the 7-bit ANSI
printable character set will always be displayed in the style of "cat
-v", even if ispell thinks that these characters are valid ISO Latin-1
on your system. This is useful when working with older terminals.
Without this switch, ispell will display 8-bit characters "as is" if
they have been defined as string characters for the chosen file type.
"Normal" mode, as well as the -l, -a, and -A options and interactive
mode (see below) also accepts the following "common" flags on the com-
mand line:
-t The input file is in TeX or LaTeX format.
-n The input file is in nroff/troff format.
-H The input file is in SGML/HTML format. (This should re-
ally be -s, but for historical reasons that flag was al-
ready taken.)
-o The input file should be treated as ordinary text. (This
could be used to override DEFTEXFLAG.)
-g The input file is in Debian control file format. Ispell
will ignore everything outside the Description(s).
-b Create a backup file by appending ".bak" to the name of
the input file.
-x Delete the backup file after spell-checking is finished.
-B Report run-together words with missing blanks as spelling
errors.
-C Consider run-together words as valid compounds.
-P Don't generate extra root/affix combinations.
-m Make possible root/affix combinations that aren't in the
dictionary.
-S Sort the list of guesses by probable correctness.
-d file
Specify an alternate dictionary file. For example, use -d
british to choose /usr/lib/ispell/british.{aff|hash} in-
stead of your default ispell dictionary.
-p file
Specify an alternate personal dictionary.
-w chars
Specify additional characters that can be part of a word.
-W n Specify length of words that are always valid.
-T type
Assume a given formatter type for all files.
The -H, -n, -t, and -o options select whether ispell runs in HTML (-H),
nroff/troff (-n), TeX/LaTeX (-t), or ordinary text (-o) input mode.
mode. (The default mode is controlled by the DEFTEXFLAG installation
option, but is normally nroff/troff mode for historical reasons.) Un-
less overridden by one of the mode-selection switches, TeX/LaTeX mode is
automatically selected if an input file has the extension ".tex", and
HTML mode is automatically selected if an input file has the extension
".html" or ".htm".
In HTML mode, HTML tags delimited by <> signs are skipped, except that
the "ALT=" construct is recognized if it appears with no spaces around
the equals sign, and the text inside is spell-checked.
In TeX/LaTeX mode, whenever a backslash ("\") is found, ispell will skip
to the next whitespace or TeX/LaTeX delimiter. Certain commands contain
arguments which should not be checked, such as labels and reference keys
as are found in the \cite command, since they contain arbitrary, non-
word arguments. Spell checking is also suppressed when in math mode.
Thus, for example, given
\chapter {This is a Ckapter} \cite{SCH86}
ispell will find "Ckapter" but not "SCH". The -t option does not recog-
nize the TeX comment character "%", so comments are also spell-checked.
It also assumes correct LaTeX syntax. Arguments to infrequently used
commands and some optional arguments are sometimes checked unnecessar-
ily. The bibliography will not be checked if ispell was compiled with
IGNOREBIB defined. Otherwise, the bibliography will be checked but the
reference key will not.
References for the tib (if available on your system), bibliography sys-
tem, that is, text between a ``[.'' or ``<.'' and ``.]'' or ``.>'' will
always be ignored in TeX/LaTeX mode.
The -b and -x options control whether ispell leaves a backup (.bak) file
for each input file. The .bak file contains the pre-corrected text. If
there are file opening or writing errors, the .bak file may be left for
recovery purposes even with the -x option. The default for this option
is controlled by the DEFNOBACKUPFLAG installation option.
The -B and -C options control how ispell handles run-together words,
such as "notthe" for "not the". If -B is specified, such words will be
considered as errors, and ispell will list variations with an inserted
blank or hyphen as possible replacements. If -C is specified, run-to-
gether words will be considered to be valid compounds, so long as both
components are in the dictionary, and each component is at least as long
as a language-dependent minimum (3 characters, by default). This is
useful for languages such as German and Norwegian, where many compound
words are formed by concatenation. (Note that compounds formed from
three or more root words will still be considered errors). The default
for this option is language-dependent; in a multi-lingual installation
the default may vary depending on which dictionary you choose. Warning:
the -C option can cause ispell to recognize non-words and misspellings.
Use it with caution!
The -P and -m options control when ispell automatically generates sug-
gested root/affix combinations for possible addition to your personal
dictionary. (These are the entries in the "guess" list which are pre-
ceded by question marks.) If -P is specified, such guesses are dis-
played only if ispell cannot generate any possibilities that match the
current dictionary. If -m is specified, such guesses are always dis-
played. This can be useful if the dictionary has a limited word list,
or a word list with few suffixes. However, you should be careful when
using this option, as it can generate guesses that produce invalid
words. The default for this option is controlled by the dictionary file
used.
The -S option suppresses ispell's normal behavior of sorting the list of
possible replacement words. Some people may prefer this, since it some-
what enhances the probability that the correct word will be low-num-
bered.
The -d option is used to specify an alternate hashed dictionary file,
other than the default. If the filename does not contain a "/", the li-
brary directory for the default dictionary file is prefixed; thus, to
use a dictionary in the local directory "-d ./xxx.hash" must be used.
This is useful to allow dictionaries for alternate languages. Unlike
previous versions of ispell, a dictionary of /dev/null is invalid, be-
cause the dictionary contains the affix table. If you need an effec-
tively empty dictionary, create a one-entry list with an unlikely string
(e.g., "qqqqq").
The -p option is used to specify an alternate personal dictionary file.
If the file name does not begin with "/", $HOME is prefixed. Also, the
shell variable WORDLIST may be set, which renames the personal dictio-
nary in the same manner. The command line overrides any WORDLIST set-
ting. If neither the -p switch nor the WORDLIST environment variable is
given, ispell will search for a personal dictionary in both the current
directory and $HOME, creating one in $HOME if none is found. The pre-
ferred name is constructed by appending ".ispell_" to the base name of
the hash file. For example, if you use the English dictionary, your
personal dictionary would be named ".ispell_english". However, if the
file ".ispell_words" exists, it will be used as the personal dictionary
regardless of the language hash file chosen. This feature is included
primarily for backwards compatibility.
If the -p option is not specified, ispell will look for personal dictio-
naries in both the current directory and the home directory. If dictio-
naries exist in both places, they will be merged. If any words are
added to the personal dictionary, they will be written to the current
directory if a dictionary already existed in that place; otherwise they
will be written to the dictionary in the home directory.
The -w option may be used to specify characters other than alphabetics
which may also appear in words. For instance, -w "&" will allow "AT&T"
to be picked up. Underscores are useful in many technical documents.
There is an admittedly crude provision in this option for 8-bit interna-
tional characters. Non-printing characters may be specified in the
usual way by inserting a backslash followed by the octal character code;
e.g., "\014" for a form feed. Alternatively, if "n" appears in the
character string, the (up to) three characters following are a DECIMAL
code 0–255, for the character. For example, to include bells and form
feeds in your words (an admittedly silly thing to do, but aren't most
pedagogical examples):
n007n012
Numeric digits other than the three following "n" are simply numeric
characters. Use of "n" does not conflict with anything because actual
alphabetics have no meaning - alphabetics are already accepted. Ispell
will typically be used with input from a file, meaning that preserving
parity for possible 8 bit characters from the input text is OK. If you
specify the -l option, and actually type text from the terminal, this
may create problems if your stty settings preserve parity.
It is not possible to use -w with certain characters. In particular,
the flag-marker character for the language (defined in the affix file,
but usually "/") can never be made into a word character.
The -W option may be used to change the length of words that ispell al-
ways accepts as valid. Normally, ispell will accept all 1-character
words as valid, which is equivalent to specifying "-W 1." (The default
for this switch is actually controlled by the MINWORD installation op-
tion, so it may vary at your installation.) If you want all words to be
checked against the dictionary, regardless of length, you might want to
specify "-W 0". On the other hand, if your document specifies a lot of
three-letter acronyms, you would specify "-W 3" to accept all words of
three letters or less. Regardless of the setting of this option, ispell
will only generate words that are in the dictionary as suggested re-
placements for words; this prevents the list from becoming too long.
Obviously, this option can be very dangerous, since short misspellings
may be missed. If you use this option a lot, you should probably make a
last pass without it before you publish your document, to protect your-
self against errors.
The -T option is used to specify a default formatter type for use in
generating string characters. This switch overrides the default type
determined from the file name. The type argument may be either one of
the unique names defined in the language affix file (e.g., nroff) or a
file suffix including the dot (e.g., .tex). If no -T option appears and
no type can be determined from the file name, the default string charac-
ter type declared in the language affix file will be used.
The -k option is used to enhance the behavior of certain deformatters.
The name parameter gives the name of a deformatter keyword set (see be-
low), and the list parameter gives a list of one or more keywords that
are to be treated specially. If list begins with a plus (+) sign, it is
added to the existing keywords; otherwise it replaces the existing key-
word list. For example, -ktexskip1 +bibliographystyle adds "bibliogra-
phystyle" to the TeX skip-1 list, while -khtmlignore pre,strong replaces
the HTML ignore list with "pre" and "strong". The lists available are:
texskip1
TeX/LaTeX commands that take a single argument that should not be
spell-checked, such as "bibliographystyle". The default is
"end", "vspace", "hspace", "cite", "ref", "parbox", "label", "in-
put", "nocite", "include", "includeonly", "documentstyle", "docu-
mentclass", "usepackage", "selectlanguage", "pagestyle", "pa-
genumbering", "hyphenation", "pageref", and "psfig", plus "bibli-
ography" in some installations. These keywords are case-sensi-
tive.
texskip2
TeX/LaTeX commands that take two arguments that should not be
spell-checked, such as "setlength". The default is "rule", "set-
counter", "addtocounter", "setlength", "addtolength", and "set-
towidth". These keywords are case-sensitive.
htmlignore
HTML tags that delimit text that should not be spell-checked un-
til the matching end tag is reached. The default is "code",
"samp", "kbd", "pre", "listing", and "address". These keywords
are case-insensitive. (Note that the content inside HTML tags,
such as HREF=, is not normally checked.)
htmlcheck
Subfields that should be spell-checked even inside HTML tags.
The default is "alt", so that the ALT= portion of IMG tags will
be spell-checked. These keywords are case-insensitive.
All of the above keyword lists can also be modified by environment vari-
ables whose names are the same as above, except in uppercase, e.g.,
TEXSKIP1. The -k switch overrides (or adds to) the environment vari-
ables, and the environment variables override or add to the built-in de-
faults.
The -F switch specifies an external deformatter program. This program
should read data from its standard input and write to its standard out-
put. The program must produce exactly one character of output for each
character of input, or ispell will lose synchronization and corrupt the
output file. Whitespace characters (especially blanks, tabs, and new-
lines) and characters that should be spell-checked should be passed
through unchanged. Characters that should not be spell-checked should
be converted into blanks or other non-word characters. For example, an
HTML deformatter might turn all HTML tags into blanks, and also blank
out all text delimited by tags such as "code" or "kbd".
The -F switch is the preferred way to deformat files for ispell, and
eventually will become the only way.
If ispell is invoked without any filenames or mode switches, it enters
an interactive mode designed to let the user check the spelling of indi-
vidual words. The program repeatedly prompts on standard output with
"word:" and responds with either "ok" (possibly with commentary), "not
found", or "how about" followed by a list of suggestions.
The -l or "list" option to ispell is used to produce a list of mis-
spelled words from the standard input.
The -a option is intended to be used from other programs through a pipe.
In this mode, ispell prints a one-line version identification message,
and then begins reading lines of input. For each input line, a single
line is written to the standard output for each word checked for
spelling on the line. If the word was found in the main dictionary, or
your personal dictionary, then the line contains only a '*'. If the
word was found through affix removal, then the line contains a '+', a
space, and the root word. If the word was found through compound forma-
tion (concatenation of two words, controlled by the -C option), then the
line contains only a '-'.
If the word is not in the dictionary, but there are near misses, then
the line contains an '&', a space, the misspelled word, a space, the
number of near misses, the number of characters between the beginning of
the line and the beginning of the misspelled word, a colon, another
space, and a list of the near misses separated by commas and spaces.
Following the near misses (and identified only by the count of near
misses), if the word could be formed by adding (invalid) affixes to a
known root, is a list of suggested derivations, again separated by com-
mas and spaces. If there are no near misses at all, the line format is
the same, except that the '&' is replaced by '?' (and the near-miss
count is always zero). The suggested derivations following the near
misses are in the form:
[prefix+] root [-prefix] [-suffix] [+suffix]
(e.g., "re+fry-y+ies" to get "refries") where each optional pfx and sfx
is a string. Also, each near miss or guess is capitalized the same as
the input word unless such capitalization is invalid; in the latter case
each near miss is capitalized correctly according to the dictionary.
Finally, if the word does not appear in the dictionary, and there are no
near misses, then the line contains a '#', a space, the misspelled word,
a space, and the character offset from the beginning of the line. Each
sentence of text input is terminated with an additional blank line, in-
dicating that ispell has completed processing the input line.
These output lines can be summarized as follows:
OK: *
Root: + <root>
Compound:
-
Miss: & <original> <count> <offset>: <miss>, <miss>, ...,
<guess>, ...
Guess: ? <original> 0 <offset>: <guess>, <guess>, ...
None: # <original> <offset>
For example, a dummy dictionary containing the words "fray", "Frey",
"fry", and "refried" might produce the following response to the command
"echo 'frqy refries' | ispell -a -m -d ./test.hash":
(#) International Ispell Version 3.0.05 (beta), 08/10/91
& frqy 3 0: fray, Frey, fry
& refries 1 5: refried, re+fry-y+ies
This mode is also suitable for interactive use when you want to figure
out the spelling of a single word.
The -A option works just like -a, except that if a line begins with the
string "&Include_File&", the rest of the line is taken as the name of a
file to read for further words. Input returns to the original file when
the include file is exhausted. Inclusion may be nested up to five deep.
The key string may be changed with the environment variable IN-
CLUDE_STRING (the ampersands, if any, must be included).
When in the -a mode, ispell will also accept lines of single words pre-
fixed with any of '*', '&', '@', '+', '-', '~', '#', '!', '%', '`', or
'^'. A line starting with '*' tells ispell to insert the word into the
user's dictionary (similar to the I command). A line starting with '&'
tells ispell to insert an all-lowercase version of the word into the
user's dictionary (similar to the U command). A line starting with '@'
causes ispell to accept this word in the future (similar to the A com-
mand). A line starting with '+', followed immediately by tex or nroff
will cause ispell to parse future input according the syntax of that
formatter. A line consisting solely of a '+' will place ispell in
TeX/LaTeX mode (similar to the -t option) and '-' returns ispell to
nroff/troff mode (but these commands are obsolete). However, the string
character type is not changed; the '~' command must be used to do this.
A line starting with '~' causes ispell to set internal parameters (in
particular, the default string character type) based on the filename
given in the rest of the line. (A file suffix is sufficient, but the
period must be included. Instead of a file name or suffix, a unique
name, as listed in the language affix file, may be specified.) However,
the formatter parsing is not changed; the '+' command must be used to
change the formatter. A line prefixed with '#' will cause the personal
dictionary to be saved. A line prefixed with '!' will turn on terse
mode (see below), and a line prefixed with '%' will return ispell to
normal (non-terse) mode. A line prefixed with '`' will turn on verbose-
correction mode (see below); this mode can only be disabled by turning
on terse mode with '%'.
Any input following the prefix characters '+', '-', '#', '!', '%', or
'`' is ignored, as is any input following the filename on a '~' line.
To allow spell-checking of lines beginning with these characters, a line
starting with '^' has that character removed before it is passed to the
spell-checking code. It is recommended that programmatic interfaces
prefix every data line with an uparrow to protect themselves against fu-
ture changes in ispell.
To summarize these:
* Add to personal dictionary
@ Accept word, but leave out of dictionary
# Save current personal dictionary
~ Set parameters based on filename
+ Enter TeX mode
- Exit TeX mode
! Enter terse mode
% Exit terse mode
` Enter verbose-correction mode
^ Spell-check rest of line
In terse mode, ispell will not print lines beginning with '*', '+', or
'-', all of which indicate correct words. This significantly improves
running speed when the driving program is going to ignore correct words
anyway.
In verbose-correction mode, ispell includes the original word immedi-
ately after the indicator character in output lines beginning with '*',
'+', and '-', which simplifies interaction for some programs.
The -s option is only valid in conjunction with the -a or -A options,
and only on BSD-derived systems. If specified, ispell will stop itself
with a SIGTSTP signal after each line of input. It will not read more
input until it receives a SIGCONT signal. This may be useful for hand-
shaking with certain text editors.
The -f option is only valid in conjunction with the -a or -A options.
If -f is specified, ispell will write its results to the given file,
rather than to standard output.
The -v option causes ispell to print its current version identification
on the standard output and exit. If the switch is doubled, ispell will
also print the options that it was compiled with.
The -c, -e[1\n5], and -D options of ispell, are primarily intended for
use by the munchlist shell script. The -c switch causes a list of words
to be read from the standard input. For each word, a list of possible
root words and affixes will be written to the standard output. Some of
the root words will be invalid and must be filtered from the output by
other means; the munchlist script does this. As an example, the com-
mand:
echo BOTHER | ispell -c
produces:
BOTHER BOTHE/R BOTH/R
The -e switch is the reverse of -c; it expands affix flags to produce a
list of words. For example, the command:
echo BOTH/R | ispell -e
produces:
BOTH BOTHER
An optional expansion level can also be specified. A level of 1 (-e1)
is the same as -e alone. A level of 2 causes the original root/affix
combination to be prepended to the line:
BOTH/R BOTH BOTHER
A level of 3 causes multiple lines to be output, one for each generated
word, with the original root/affix combination followed by the word it
creates:
BOTH/R BOTH
BOTH/R BOTHER
A level of 4 causes a floating-point number to be appended to each of
the level-3 lines, giving the ratio between the length of the root and
the total length of all generated words including the root:
BOTH/R BOTH 2.500000
BOTH/R BOTHER 2.500000
A level of 5 causes multiple lines to be output, one for each generated
word. If the generated word did not use any affixes, the line is just
that word. If one or more affixes were used, the original root and the
affixes actually used are printed, joined by a plus sign; then the gen-
erated word is printed:
BOTH
BOTH+R BOTHER
Finally, the -D flag causes the affix tables from the dictionary file to
be dumped to standard output.
Ispell is aware of the correct capitalizations of words in the dictio-
nary and in your personal dictionary. As well as recognizing words that
must be capitalized (e.g., George) and words that must be all-capitals
(e.g., NASA), it can also handle words with "unusual" capitalization
(e.g., "ITCorp" or "TeX"). If a word is capitalized incorrectly, the
list of possibilities will include all acceptable capitalizations.
(More than one capitalization may be acceptable; for example, my dictio-
nary lists both "ITCorp" and "ITcorp".)
Normally, this feature will not cause you surprises, but there is one
circumstance you need to be aware of. If you use "I" to add a word to
your dictionary that is at the beginning of a sentence (e.g., the first
word of this paragraph if "normally" were not in the dictionary), it
will be marked as "capitalization required". A subsequent usage of this
word without capitalization (e.g., the quoted word in the previous sen-
tence) will be considered a misspelling by ispell, and it will suggest
the capitalized version. You must then compare the actual spellings by
eye, and then type "I" to add the uncapitalized variant to your personal
dictionary. You can avoid this problem by using "U" to add the original
word, rather than "I".
The rules for capitalization are as follows:
(1) Any word may appear in all capitals, as in headings.
(2) Any word that is in the dictionary in all-lowercase form may ap-
pear either in lowercase or capitalized (as at the beginning of a
sentence).
(3) Any word that has "funny" capitalization (i.e., it contains both
cases and there is an uppercase character besides the first) must
appear exactly as in the dictionary, except as permitted by rule
(1). If the word is acceptable in all-lowercase, it must appear
thus in a dictionary entry.
buildhash
The buildhash program builds hashed dictionary files for later use by
ispell. The raw word list (with affix flags) is given in dict-file, and
the affix flags are defined by affix-file. The hashed output is written
to hash-file. The formats of the two input files are described in is-
pell(5). The -s (silent) option suppresses the usual status messages
that are written to the standard error device.
munchlist
The munchlist shell script is used to reduce the size of dictionary
files, primarily personal dictionary files. It is also capable of com-
bining dictionaries from various sources. The given files are read
(standard input if no arguments are given), reduced to a minimal set of
roots and affixes that will match the same list of words, and written to
standard output.
Input for munchlist contains of raw words (e.g from your personal dic-
tionary files) or root and affix combinations (probably generated in
earlier munchlist runs). Each word or root/affix combination must be on
a separate line.
The -D (debug) option leaves temporary files around under standard names
instead of deleting them, so that the script can be debugged. Warning:
on a multiuser system, this can be a security hole. To avoid possible
destruction of important files, don't run the script as root, and set
MUNCHDEBUGDIR to the name of a directory that only you can access.
The -v (verbose) option causes progress messages to be reported to
stderr so you won't get nervous that munchlist has hung.
If the -s (strip) option is specified, words that are in the specified
hash-file are removed from the word list. This can be useful with per-
sonal dictionaries.
The -l option can be used to specify an alternate affix-file for munch-
ing dictionaries in languages other than English.
The -c option can be used to convert dictionaries that were built with
an older affix file, without risk of accidentally introducing unintended
affix combinations into the dictionary.
The -T option allows dictionaries to be converted to a canonical string-
character format. The suffix specified is looked up in the affix file
(-l switch) to determine the string-character format used for the input
file; the output always uses the canonical string-character format. For
example, a dictionary collected from TeX source files might be converted
to canonical format by specifying -T tex.
The -w option is passed on to ispell.
findaffix
The findaffix shell script is an aid to writers of new language descrip-
tions in choosing affixes. The given dictionary files (standard input
if none are given) are examined for possible prefixes (-p switch) or
suffixes (-s switch, the default). Each commonly-occurring affix is
presented along with a count of the number of times it appears and an
estimate of the number of bytes that would be saved in a dictionary hash
file if it were added to the language table. Only affixes that generate
valid roots (found in the original input) are listed.
If the "-c" option is not given, the output lines are in the following
format:
strip/add/count/bytes
where strip is the string that should be stripped from a root word be-
fore adding the affix, add is the affix to be added, count is a count of
the number of times that this strip/add combination appears, and bytes
is an estimate of the number of bytes that might be saved in the raw
dictionary file if this combination is added to the affix file. The
field separator in the output will be the tab character specified by the
-t switch; the default is a slash ("/").
If the -c ("clean output") option is given, the appearance of the output
is made visually cleaner (but harder to post-process) by changing it to:
-strip+add<tab>count<tab>bytes
where strip, add, count, and bytes are as before, and <tab> represents
the ASCII tab character.
The method used to generate possible affixes will also generate longer
affixes which have common headers or trailers. For example, the two
words "moth" and "mother" will generate not only the obvious substitu-
tion "+er" but also "-h+her" and "-th+ther" (and possibly even longer
ones, depending on the value of min). To prevent cluttering the output
with such affixes, any affix pair that shares a common header (or, for
prefixes, trailer) string longer than elim characters (default 1) will
be suppressed. You may want to set "elim" to a value greater than 1 if
your language has string characters; usually the need for this parameter
will become obvious when you examine the output of your findaffix run.
Normally, the affixes are sorted according to the estimate of bytes
saved. The -f switch may be used to cause the affixes to be sorted by
frequency of appearance.
To save output file space, affixes which occur fewer than 10 times are
eliminated; this limit may be changed with the -l switch. The -M switch
specifies a maximum affix length (default 8). Affixes longer than this
will not be reported. (This saves on temporary disk space and makes the
script run faster.)
Affixes which generate stems shorter than 3 characters are suppressed.
(A stem is the word after the strip string has been removed, and before
the add string has been added.) This reduces both the running time and
the size of the output file. This limit may be changed with the -m
switch. The minimum stem length should only be set to 1 if you have a
lot of free time and disk space (in the range of many days and hundreds
of megabytes).
The findaffix script requires a non-blank field-separator character for
internal use. Normally, this character is a slash ("/"), but if the
slash appears as a character in the input word list, a different charac-
ter can be specified with the -t switch.
Ispell dictionaries should be expanded before being fed to findaffix; in
addition, characters that are not in the English alphabet (if any)
should be translated to lowercase.
tryaffix
The tryaffix shell script is used to estimate the effectiveness of a
proposed prefix (-p switch) or suffix (-s switch, the default) with a
given expanded-file. Only one affix can be tried with each execution of
tryaffix, although multiple arguments can be used to describe varying
forms of the same affix flag (e.g., the D flag for English can add ei-
ther D or ED depending on whether a trailing E is already present).
Each word in the expanded dictionary that ends (or begins) with the cho-
sen suffix (or prefix) has that suffix (prefix) removed; the dictionary
is then searched for root words that match the stripped word. Normally,
all matching roots are written to standard output, but if the -c (count)
flag is given, only a statistical summary of the results is written.
The statistics given are a count of words the affix potentially applies
to and an estimate of the number of dictionary bytes that a flag using
the affix would save. The estimate will be high if the flag generates
words that are currently generated by other affix flags (e.g., in Eng-
lish, bathers can be generated by either bath/X or bather/S).
The dictionary file, expanded-file, must already be expanded (using the
-e switch of ispell) and sorted, and things will usually work best if
uppercase has been folded to lower with 'tr'.
The affix arguments are things to be stripped from the dictionary file
to produce trial roots: for English, con (prefix) and ing (suffix) are
examples. The addition parts of the argument are letters that would
have been stripped off the root before adding the affix. For example,
in English the affix ing normally strips e for words ending in that let-
ter (e.g., like becomes liking) so we might run:
tryaffix ing ing+e
to cover both cases.
All of the shell scripts contain documentation as commentary at the be-
ginning; sometimes these comments contain useful information beyond the
scope of this manual page.
It is possible to install ispell in such a way as to only support ASCII
range text if desired.
icombine
The icombine program is a helper for munchlist. It reads a list of
words in dictionary format (roots plus flags) from the standard input,
and produces a reduced list on standard output which combines common
roots found on adjacent entries. Identical roots which have differing
flags will have their flags combined, and roots which have differing
capitalizations will be combined in a way which only preserves important
capitalization information. The optional aff-file specifies a language
file which defines the character sets used and the meanings of the vari-
ous flags. The -T switch can be used to select among alternative string
character types by giving a dummy suffix that can be found in an alt-
stringtype statement. The -w switch is identical to the same switch in
ispell.
ijoin
The ijoin program is a re-implementation of join(1) which handles long
lines and 8-bit characters correctly. The -s switch specifies that the
sort(1) program used to prepare the input to ijoin uses signed compar-
isons on 8-bit characters; the -u switch specifies that sort(1) uses un-
signed comparisons. All other options and behaviors of join(1) are du-
plicated as exactly as possible based on the manual page, except that
ijoin will not handle newline as a field separator. See the join(1)
manual page for more information.
ENVIRONMENT
DICTIONARY
Default dictionary to use, if no -d flag is given.
ISPELL_CHARSET
Formatter type or character encoding to use, if none is chosen by
a flag option.
WORDLIST
Personal dictionary file name
INCLUDE_STRING
Code for file inclusion under the -A option
TMPDIR Directory used for some of munchlist's temporary files
MUNCHDEBUGDIR
Directory used to hold the output of munchlists' -D option.
TEXSKIP1
List of single-argument TeX keywords that ispell should ignore.
TEXSKIP2
List of two-argument TeX keywords that ispell should ignore.
HTMLIGNORE
List of HTML keywords that delimit text that should not be spell-
checked.
HTMLCHECK
List of HTML fields that should always be spell-checked, even in-
side a tag.
FILES
/usr/lib/ispell/default.hash
Hashed dictionary (may be found in some other local directory,
depending on the system).
/usr/lib/ispell/default.aff
Affix-definition file for munchlist
/usr/share/dict/words
For the Lookup function.
$HOME/.ispell_hashfile
User's private dictionary
.ispell_hashfile
Directory-specific private dictionary
SEE ALSO
egrep(1), look(1), join(1), sort(1), spell(1), sq(1), tib (if available
on your system), ispell(5), english(5)
BUGS
Ispell should understand more troff syntax, and deal more intelligently
with contractions.
Although small personal dictionaries are sorted before they are written
out, the order of capitalizations of the same word is somewhat random.
When the -x flag is specified, ispell will unlink any existing .bak
file.
There are too many flags, and many of them have non-mnemonic names.
The -e flag should accept mnemonic arguments instead of numeric ones.
Munchlist does not deal very gracefully with dictionaries which contain
"non-word" characters. Such characters ought to be deleted from the
dictionary with a warning message.
AUTHOR
Pace Willisson (pace@mit-vax), 1983, based on the PDP-10 assembly ver-
sion. That version was written by R. E. Gorin in 1971, and later re-
vised by W. E. Matson (1974) and W. B. Ackerman (1978).
Collected, revised, and enhanced for the Usenet by Walt Buehring, 1987.
Table-driven multi-lingual version by Geoff Kuenning, 1987–88.
Large dictionaries provided by Bob Devine (vianet!devine).
A complete list of contributors is too large to list here, but is dis-
tributed with the ispell sources in the file "Contributors".
VERSION
The version of ispell described by this manual page is International Is-
pell Version 3.4.06 30 Oct 2023.
local ISPELL(1)
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