Spell checking and dictionary manipulation

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.

How to do it...

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 ...