Forums Feature Suggestions Spell checker

I'm glad you learned how to google and click the first result. Unfortunately, you're repeating an uncorroborated statement that has little bearing on reality. I can't find anything that backs up your claim that mimick is "no longer accepted as a correct spelling". When was that decision made? Was there a meeting? Mimick is still used in prose today, and the alternate form "mimic" is actually just as "archaic"; it dates back to the 1500's according to Google books search results, which, by the way, is actually prior to the spelling of "mimick" as these results show. So, contrary to your implication, "mimic" is not a newer version of the word mimick-- it's actually the other way around.



You're right about this, but this is where the complications I mentioned above come into play. Feel free to actually read what I wrote in my first post, but just in case, I'll reiterate: these libraries tend to be really bad at pluralization or verb tense/conjugation; they basically have no concept of it. You could add "foo", but "foos" "foo'd" "fooing" and other versions would still be considered incorrect. You'd have to add every permutation of every word outside your dictionary. You make it sound trivial-- it's not. I know because I've recently done this using hunspell (hence my mentioning of it above) for technical documentation I recently wrote. Technical documentation, with lots of technical jargon, fell outside the scope of the dictionary many times. Unfortunately, adding most of the technical words was not enough, as they were conjugated and used in many forms. We actually discovered that our custom word list ranged into the hundreds of words, and it took quite a while to sift through all the text to pick out those words (even though we had tools to help).

This is not a problem if the dictionary is good-- the problem is most dictionaries aren't... and they can't be, because of situations like technical terminology and even simple things like "mimic" vs "mimick" (neither is wrong, one is just no longer popular in the US, which, I should point out, is only one country of the other English speaking countries out there). But realize the point I'm making-- it's not about adding words. Because, rather than bothering to add these words, most people will be trained to ignore the red lines. This follows the same UI principles surrounding the overuse of confirmation dialogs; if you show a user too many of them, they begin to just click Yes without reading. False positives and inaccurate spell checking causes the same problem. The question is; how many false positives do you get over IRC; and how many spelling errors are being missed that would have been caught?

This goes back to the cost benefit question. Yes, it's something for Khaled to decide (I basically already said that), but I'm merely pointing out the problem. I'm not sure how you confused this with me providing the final say on the issue. I'm raising the issues to be considered, which is why I started my original post with "The real issue, in my opinion, is ..."