aspell — spelling with foreign dictionaries 
Introduction
Regardless of whether you are a spelling genius or a spelling disaster, like myself, it is useful to have a spellchecker handy. There are number of tools available for this purpose. For single words, Google is quite useful. There are many other websites with spellchecking and lexical capabilities, such as the free dictionary, Cambridge dictionary, dictionary.com, and wordnet, to name just a few. One could also use chunky tools such as the Open Office Writer. Instead, I use a light-weight shell program called aspell. aspell may be used to check spelling interactively from the shell as shown below.
$ aspell -a
@(#) International Ispell Version 3.1.20 (but really Aspell 0.60.3)
Polish dictionary
*
*
Note that the leading stars correspond to the spellchecked words and indicate that they have been spelled correctly, on the other hand, if we try to spell check poilsh dictionary we get
$ aspell -a
@(#) International Ispell Version 3.1.20 (but really Aspell 0.60.3)
poilsh dictionary
& poilsh 29 0: Polish, polish, palish, plush, polisher, plash, …
*
where the first word, poilsh, is flagged as a spelling mistake using a leading ampersand with included potential alternative spellings, while the second word, dictionary, is marked with a star since it is spelled correctly.
It is also possible to spellcheck entire documents with aspell as follows.
$ aspell -c file_to_spellcheck.txt
When a spelling mistake is encountered, aspell goes into an interactive mode allowing the user to make spelling corrections.
Foreign languages
How about spellchecking in a language other than the default one? Well, lets try to spellcheck the Polish translation of Polish dictionary, i.e. polski slownik.
$ aspell -a
@(#) International Ispell Version 3.1.20 (but really Aspell 0.60.3)
polski slownik
& polski 29 0: pol ski, pol-ski, Pulaski, Polanski, Polk, pols, …
& slownik 12 7: Salonika, slink, slunk, Slinky, slinky, Sloan, …
We got spelling errors since the default dictionary is an English dictionary. It is possible to specify a custom dictionary using the -d option, however, an error will occur if the custom dictionary has not been installed or is unavailable:
$ aspell -dpl -a
Error: The file "/usr/lib/aspell-0.60/pl" can not be opened for reading.
Installing foreign dictionaries
How to install a foreign dictionary? Simple… lets walk through dictionary installation using Polish dictionary as an example. Polish version of aspell dictionary can be obtained from http://www.kurnik.org/dictionary. After download extract the archive as follows:
$ tar xjf alt-aspell6-pl-6.0_20070912-0.tar.bz2 $ ls -la total 42080 drwx—— 11 kamil kamil 4096 Sep 12 18:28 . drwx—— 18 kamil kamil 4096 Aug 29 15:37 .. drwx—— 3 kamil kamil 4096 Sep 12 15:00 aspell6-pl-6.0_20070912-0 -rw——- 1 kamil kamil 557834 Sep 12 18:26 alt-aspell6-pl-6.0_20070912-0.tar.bz2
Enter the extracted directory:
$ cd aspell6-pl-6.0_20070912-0/ $ ls -la total 2452 drwx—— 3 kamil kamil 4096 Sep 12 15:00 . drwx—— 11 kamil kamil 4096 Sep 12 18:28 .. drwx—— 2 kamil kamil 4096 Sep 12 15:00 doc -rwx—— 1 kamil kamil 2477 Sep 12 15:00 configure -rw——- 1 kamil kamil 149 Sep 12 15:00 Copyright -rw——- 1 kamil kamil 340 Sep 12 15:00 info -rw——- 1 kamil kamil 1745 Sep 12 15:00 Makefile.pre -rw——- 1 kamil kamil 241083 Sep 12 15:00 pl_affix.dat -rw——- 1 kamil kamil 2214173 Sep 12 15:00 pl.cwl -rw——- 1 kamil kamil 71 Sep 12 15:00 pl.dat -rw——- 1 kamil kamil 70 Sep 12 15:00 pl.multi -rw——- 1 kamil kamil 72 Sep 12 15:00 polish.alias -rw——- 1 kamil kamil 2539 Sep 12 15:00 README
Run configure:
$ ./configure
Finding Dictionary file location … /usr/lib/aspell-0.60
Finding Data file location … /usr/lib/aspell-0.60
After configure finds where aspell libs reside on your system, run make install:
$ sudo make install
/usr/bin/prezip-bin -d < pl.cwl | /usr/bin/aspell –lang=pl create master ./pl.rws
Warning: Removing inapplicable affix 'm' from word ka.
Warning: Removing inapplicable affix 'y' from word nied?wiedzi.
Warning: Removing inapplicable affix 'B' from word owa?.
Warning: Removing inapplicable affix 'G' from word owa?.
Warning: Removing inapplicable affix 'J' from word owa?.
Warning: Removing inapplicable affix 'E' from word przepiszcze?.
Warning: Removing inapplicable affix 'Y' from word ty.
mkdir -p /usr/lib/aspell-0.60/
cp pl.rws pl.multi polish.alias /usr/lib/aspell-0.60/
cd /usr/lib/aspell-0.60/ && chmod 644 pl.rws pl.multi polish.alias
mkdir -p /usr/lib/aspell-0.60/
cp pl.dat pl_affix.dat /usr/lib/aspell-0.60/
cd /usr/lib/aspell-0.60/ && chmod 644 pl.dat pl_affix.dat
Have a look in the aspell libs directory, you should now have the Polish dictionary files (amongst others) in there.
$ ls -la /usr/lib/aspell-0.60/
total 12660
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Sep 12 18:29 .
drwxr-xr-x 207 root root 139264 Jun 24 14:02 ..
…
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 90 Jul 12 2006 en_GB-ise.multi
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 110 Jul 12 2006 en_GB-ise-w_accents.multi
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 93056 Jul 12 2006 en_GB-ise-w_accents-only.rws
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 111 Jul 12 2006 en_GB-ise-wo_accents.multi
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 93056 Jul 12 2006 en_GB-ise-wo_accents-only.rws
…
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 241083 Sep 12 18:29 pl_affix.dat
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 71 Sep 12 18:29 pl.dat
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 70 Sep 12 18:29 pl.multi
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 6642032 Sep 12 18:29 pl.rws
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 72 Sep 12 18:29 polish.alias
…
Using foreign dictionaries
You can now use Polish dictionary as follows:
$ aspell -dpl -a
@(#) International Ispell Version 3.1.20 (but really Aspell 0.60.3)
polski slownik
*
& slownik 53 7: słownik, ?liwnik, sokownik, Salonik, …
No more mistakes after making one correction.
$ aspell -dpl -a
@(#) International Ispell Version 3.1.20 (but really Aspell 0.60.3)
polski słownik
*
*
Other languages can be specified in a similar fashion, f.e. for french dictionary we would use -dfr, assuming that the french aspell dictionary files are installed. If they are not, locate their installation sources on the Internet and follow the above procedure. It should be very similar.
Also, note that an on-line Polish-English dictionary can be found at dict.pl.
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February 25th, 2008 at 7:19 am
Hello,
Is it possible to use aspell with dictionaries in different languages? I have tried to use the add-extra-dicts option but it complains that the default language is say english. I can use either a french, a dutch, an english or whatever other dict, but not all at once which is what I need.
Thanks for your help
Best wishes
anne
February 25th, 2008 at 10:44 am
Hi Anne, thanks for this great question! Unfortunately, as far as I can ascertain, aspell cannot be used with multiple dictionaries in different languages, whilst multiple dictionaries in the same language are quite ok.
Note that running aspell –extra-dicts=pl -a produes the following error:
Worry not however! The beauty and the power of Linux come form its shell tools… and my mate James, from awklores, is writing a simple awk script for you right now. The script will list all words in an input file that do not occur in any of the specified dictionaries, along with the spelling suggestions.
I presume you use aspell like so:
cat spellme.txt |aspell -a
or equivalently:
aspell -a < spellme.txt
or by pasting text into the terminal after running:
aspell -a
On the other hand, emulation of aspell's interactive mode for multiple languages would be a 'bit' more tricky, so we'll leave that one for another time.
February 25th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Here is a very preliminary version of the multi-dictionary aspell bash script: mspell as well as a test file I used: spellme.txt. Here is the listing for both:
cat mspell spellme.txt
#!/bin/bash while read line; do ENGLISH=`echo $line | aspell -a --lang=en | awk '/^&/ && NF>0 && NR>1'`; POLISH=`echo $line | aspell -a --lang=pl | awk ' /^&/ && NF>0 && NR>1'`; awk -v en="$ENGLISH" -v pl="$POLISH" \ 'BEGIN{ split(en, en_lines, "\n"); split(pl, pl_lines, "\n"); for(e in en_lines){ split(en_lines[e], en_words, " "); for(p in pl_lines){ split(pl_lines[p], pl_words, " "); if(en_words[2]==pl_words[2]) printf "\nEnglish Suggestions: "en_lines[e]"\nPolish Suggestions: "pl_lines[p]"\n"; } } }' done be or nnot to bee ttto blah yeah be or mehhhh to bee ttto blah yeah be or nnot to ttto blah yeahHere are ways you can run mspell:
./mspell < spellme.txt
or
./mspell
Please check for updates in the future as we'll polish this code over time.