[Tfug] ispell vs aspell

[Bexley Hall]

> On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 01:44:42PM
> -0800, Bexley Hall wrote:
> > Best advice with any spell checker is to trim the size of your
> > dictionary.
> 
> Huh?  If anything, I find myself adding discipline-specific jargon to
> my personal dictionary.  Not kicking stuff out.

"Special words" make sense to add.  However, the larger your
dictionary is, the fewer errors it will detect.  While this
sounds counterintuitive, it is, in fact, completely intuitive!
The more words in your dictionary, the more "valid spellings"
your spell-checker will detect.

E.g., I don't have "their" and "there" in my spell checker
because it forces me to look at each use and decide which
one I really want.  If both are present, then *some* spell
checkers will consult context to try to refine the correct
choice (some are context free).  I.e., if I mistype "dog"
and hit 'f' instead of 'd' I get another valid word -- "fog".
And, since both are nouns, even context can't help to determine
that "I took the fog out for a walk" contains a spelling error.

OTOH, if you add all your technical vocabulary, proper
nouns, etc. to the dictionary (likely to be very unique
words with only one legitimate way of spelling them and
a large Hamming distance to any other legitimate words),
then any time you see one of those pop up as an error, you
*know* it is an error.