spell

Additional Notes

spell is a spell-checking program that reads text from standard input and outputs words that are not found in the system dictionary. It is a legacy Unix command that has been largely replaced by more modern spelling tools like aspell and hunspell.

The command applies a set of rules including dictionary lookup, morphological analysis, and suffix/prefix stripping. Words not recognized by any of these methods are printed one per line on standard output. On many modern Linux distributions, spell is a compatibility wrapper around aspell or hunspell.

Syntax

spell [options] [file...]

Parameters

• file: Text file(s) to spell-check. If omitted, reads from standard input.

Common Options

• -b: Use British English dictionary instead of American English.
• -l: Show all misspelled words in a list (default behavior).
• -i: Ignore include files.
• -n: Show the line number of each misspelled word.
• -v: Show all words, including correctly spelled ones (verbose).
• -x: Show suggestions for misspelled words (if supported by backend).
• -d dict: Use an alternative dictionary file.

Examples

spell document.txt

Check document.txt and output all misspelled words.

cat report.txt | spell

Check text piped from a file via standard input.

spell -b document.txt

Check spelling using British English dictionary.

spell -v document.txt

Show all words found in the document.

Practical Notes

• spell is not installed by default on many modern distributions. Install aspell or hunspell as alternatives.
• The output is a list of potentially misspelled words, one per line.
• System dictionaries are typically located in /usr/share/dict/ or /var/lib/hunspell/.
• Proper nouns, technical terms, and acronyms may appear as false positives.
• For interactive spell-checking, use aspell check file or a text editor with spell-check built in.