Bug in spell?

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <18491 at ttidca.TTI.COM> davidd at ttidcb.tti.com (David Dantowitz) writes:
>I've added the word "Recal" to a spell dictionary (using spellin) and
>verified that it is in the dictionary using spellout, but spell still
>prints the word as mispelled.
>Any clues?

Yes; you should use the +local_list option, rather than adding such a
nonword to the main dictionary.  The word you would have had to have
added is "cal", since that is what is left after prefix stripping.
It is not a good idea to add such obvious candidates for typos to the
dictionary, as that reduces the utility of "spell".  Note that UNIX
"spell" is NOT meant to produce NO output for a perfect document;
rather, it should produce a small list of candidates for misspelled
words that one is expected to inspect closely to Find genuine errors.
An occasional "recal" in the output is easy to deal with, if for some
reason you think "recal" is not a spelling error for your application.
However, the local word list feature can be utilized to quite nicely
eliminate site-specific jargon, local proper names, and the like.