Spell–checking and dictionary manipulation

Most Linux distributions include a dictionary file. However, very few people are aware of this, thus spelling errors abound. The aspell command-line utility is a spell checker. Let's go through a few scripts that make use of the dictionary file and the spell checker.

How to do it...

The /usr/share/dict/ directory contains one or perhaps more dictionary files, which are text files with a list of 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...