spell

NAME

spell - check spelling in text

SYNOPSIS

spell [-bvx] [+local_dict] [file ...]

DESCRIPTION

The spell(1) utility compares words from one or more files specified in file (or standard input if no files are named) with those in a spelling list. It writes to standard output all words that were not found on the list.

The spell(1) utility takes the following options:

-b
Check against a British dictionary. The default dictionary is American English. The British dictionary contains spellings such as colour, behaviour, and recognise.
-v
Write all words not in the spelling list. This is the default behavior. Some implementations of spell(1) also check against possible permutations of the words in the spelling list; for those systems, this option turns off that behavior.
-x
Display root stems of words as =.
+local_dict

Treat the words in the file local_dict as correctly spelled. They will not appear in the spell(1) output. These words are checked in addition to the usual dictionary file.

DIAGNOSTICS

The spell(1) command exits with a status of 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurred.

FILES

The spell(1) command makes use of the following files:

/usr/share/spell/british.hash
British English dictionary extensions.
/usr/share/spell/english.hash
American english dictionary file (the default).

NOTE

The spell(1) command is a wrapper around the ispell(1) command. For information on dictionary files, formats, and other options that might be supported, see the reference page for ispell(1).

SEE ALSO

ispell(1)