How to remove an entry from ispell private dictionary?

Question

I was wondering how could I remove one (wrongly inserted) entry/word from the ispell private-dictionary.

EDIT

after more digging i am still unable to delete entries from default dictionary, but I think the solution could be around buildhash program. The problem is to generate the list of entries to delete... i do not find a simple example.

Theo

Answer 1

On my cygwin install ispell is just a wrapper around aspell:

$ ispell
Ispell compatibility script for Aspell.
Usage: /usr/bin/ispell [options] -a|-l|-v[v]|-c|-e[1-4]|<file>

If that is true of your installation, then you need to look at aspell files. Try aspell dump config.

Lee

This does not answer the question on how to REMOVE a word from a private dictionary. :/ – Gloom

One place where aspell puts its spellings is $HOME/.aspell.en.pws (with, I presume, the en matching your language locale). Just deleting words from that list is one way to remove entries from your private spelling dictionary. – Philbrick

Answer 2

You should just be able to edit your personal dictionary file to remove the unwanted entry. The dictionary file is a text file, probably located at ~/.ispell_default, or ~/.ispell_[LANGUAGE], e.g. ~/.ispell_italian.

Martinamartindale

thanks for quick reply, but I do not have such files (working in xubuntu 11.10). already looked in all files named *ispell* but the *.hash files because I do not know how to read them. – Theo

Have you looked at ~/.aspell.en.pws (en is for english). – Secede

Answer 3

If you are using Emacs, it creates its own personal dictionary file under what Emacs sees as ~/.aspell.[LANGUAGE].pws. On Windows this happens to be: C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\. This is probably just an effect of the environment Emacs runs the dictionary under. To edit it in Emacs, you can use the tilde *nix style path, as well as the absolute DOS style path.

Mending

Answer 4

Super late to the party but hopefully I can help someone else with this issue. If you look at the top of the emacs window it tells you what program emacs is using for the dictionary. In my case it read "prog: hunspell."

So all you have to do in that case is find the hunspell dictionary and edit (i.e., remove) the rogue word.

In my case, 'emacs ~/.hunspell_en_US', opened a text file where I located and removed the word I accidentally added.

Beeswing