Most of the Linux distributions come with a dictionary file along with them. However, I find very few people to be aware of the dictionary file and hence, few make use of them. There is a command-line utility called aspell
that functions as a spell checker. Let's go through a few scripts that make use of the dictionary file and the spell checker.
The /usr/share/dict/ directory contains some of the dictionary files. Dictionary files are text files that contain a list of dictionary words. We can use this list to check whether a word is a dictionary word or not.
$ ls /usr/share/dict/ american-english british-english
To check whether the given word is a dictionary word, use the following script:
#!/bin/bash #Filename: checkword.sh word=$1 grep "^$1$" /usr/share/dict/british-english -q if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then echo $word is a dictionary word; else echo $word is not a dictionary word; fi
The usage is as follows:
$ ./checkword.sh ful ...