Re: Spellcheck a list
Re: Spellcheck a list
- Subject: Re: Spellcheck a list
- From: "Dennis W. Manasco" <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2004 04:08:22 -0500
At 12:07 pm -0400 10/4/04, Graff wrote:
I did use a regular expression. I added the start-of-line marker "^"
and the end-of-line marker "$" to the string before I quoted it. I
did this so that I would get only unique matches rather than any
line that contained the string. For example:
using:
grep '^youth$' /usr/share/dict/words
gives me:
youth
using:
fgrep 'youth' /usr/share/dict/words
gives me:
overyouthful
preyouthful
...
...
using:
fgrep -iw 'youth' /usr/share/dict/words
gives only:
youth
(OMM)
(See 'man fgrep' in Terminal.)
At 11:08 am -0700 10/4/04, Paul Berkowitz wrote:
youthy? youthily? youthwort? youthen? unyouthfully? preyouthful?
What nonsense is all this? These aren't real words. They're stupid
guesses made by a computer which has been told how to add suffixes
and prefixes to root words to make putative parts of speech which
_might_ be words, but patently are not so for most root words -
including "youth".
Actually, the first five words you cited are listed as explicit
header words in the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.). I didn't try
very hard to track down 'preyouthful,' but it may be somewhere in the
second tier, as was 'youthheid' (one I thought surely spurious) (it's
a variation of 'youthhead': 1. The state of youth, youngness; 2. The
time of youth, adolescence; 3. Youths collectively). I'd guess then
that 'preyouthful' was used to mean 'preadolescent.'
'Youthwort,' by the way, is an alternative name for 'sundew': Any
plant of the genus Drosera, which comprises small herbs growing in
bogs, with leaves covered with glandular hairs secreting viscid drops
which glitter in the sun like dew; esp. D. rotundifolia (round-leaved
or common sundew).
This is not something which should be used by anyone looking for a
proper spellchecker. It's a joke.
No, it's not a joke. It's just nerdishly (a word not cited in any of
my references) complete, as are many things *nixen.
But I also agree -- It's not particularly useful unless you're apt to
be spellchecking things like the OED's AD 1375 citation from 'Sc.
Leg. Saints': "Quhare hele beis ay but seknes, youthed but eld or
wrechitnes."
Using grep looking for specific words with it should be OK.
Otherwise the other options in this thread sound much more promising
I'd think that was excellent advice.
It would make my year if they'd reissue the American Heritage
Dictionary (3rd ed., Electronic Edition, SoftKey/Houghton Mifflin,
1995) in an OSX and scriptable version. I've used it for years and
it's the best locally-on-line dictionary I've ever tried. It also
guesses the correct words for my chronic misspellings better than
anything else I've used.
Best wishes,
-=-Dennis
.
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