Document how to add words to dictionaries

[skangas]

I have been unable to find a way to add words to the aspell en_US and en_GB dictionaries. What is the best way to go about this? Please see this discussion for background: codespell-project/codespell#2598

I also have plenty of words to add to the sv_SE (Swedish) dictionary. I'm not sure what is the procedure in that case either.

Could this be documented prominently in the README and/or on aspell.net?

Thanks.

[DimitriPapadopoulos]

This might be a duplicate of #617.

There are open issues about updating some dictionaries, for example #635, #604. They seem to suggest (some?) dictionaries are maintained elsewhere, and aspell is updated from time to time from these various sources. Not sure how the list of dictionaries https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict/0index.html is updated, this seems to be a manual process.

The mailing list archive also suggests that (some?) dictionaries are maintained elsewhere, and that the maintainers attempt to push their changes from time to time using the mailing lists:

• [req] Update Polish dictionary version in Dict. table
• Re: Updating dictionaries

The real challenge is how to find the groups actively maintaining each dictionary, and how to contribute. For example, I cannot find links to Slovak http://sk-spell.sk.cx/ and https://github.com/sk-spell under https://aspell.net.

Note that the International Plans page has not been updated since 2000. Ouch.

[DimitriPapadopoulos]

See #617 (comment) for my findings about English dictionaries.

In short, see SCOWL (And Friends) and https://github.com/en-wl/wordlist.

[DimitriPapadopoulos]

However, chances are the words you have in mind are not missing from the above dictionaries. Most probably, we don't use the proper dictionary size. The default size is 60 on a scale from 10 to 90. From the aspell man page:

size

(string) The preferred size of the word list. This consists of a two char digit code describing the size of the list, with typical values of: 10=tiny, 20=really small, 30=small, 40=med-small, 50=med, 60=med-large, 70=large, 80=huge, 90=insane.

[DimitriPapadopoulos]

Actually, some words may be present in some SCOWL (And Friends) word lists, but it looks like they are filtered out when building dictionaries.

That's exactly the case for donut, see en-wl/wordlist#310.

So you do need to open an issue to get it added to the next version of the dictionaries.