Installing new words in SysV spelling checker

[John Cowan]

I am attempting to add new words to the spelling checker's list.
I am using a Xenix/386 system, but as far as I know SCO and Microsoft
have made no mods to the spelling checker.  I followed the procedures in
the man page in detail, but get bad results.

To recap the procedure, I ran 'hashmake' on my new words, generating a list
of 9-digit hash codes.  I then ran 'hashcheck' on the existing list to
generate a much larger hash code list.  I sorted and uniqed these
and fed the consolidated list to 'spellin', which generates a new 
spell-usable hash table.  'Spellin' takes an argument which is supposed
to be the number of hash codes in the input.

Unfortunately, 'spellin' keeps telling me that about 450 of my input codes
are "ignored".  Why, why, why?  Based on a 'hashcheck' of the newly created
list followed by a 'diff', it seems that the ignored codes are from the end
of the input.  This is terrible, as critical words like "it" and "idea" are
being ignored, and 'spell' now reports them as erroneous.

I tried tinkering with the argument to spellin, adding and subtracting various
increments rather than using the straight 'wc -l' output.  This only made
more or fewer hash codes marked "ignored".  This is really disastrous.

As a final reality check, I tried using 'spellin' on the vanilla output of
'hashcheck'.  Hurray!  0 words ignored.  But none of my new words are being
recognized, so I'm back at square 1.

Can any 'spell' guru enlighten me?  I have marked this article "Followup-To:
poster", as I don't read this group regularly.  Please respond by e-mail.