Ideas
Spellcheck updates
Is there an easy way to collect names (e.g. Aceh, Depp, Wonka,), new words (e.g. PDA, blog), etc., used on the BBC website, and repackage them as a "Lexicon Update" for commonly used word processing and email software?
- 13 Jul 2005 03:40 PM
Sounds like a useful idea. I don't know if software manufacturers provide any easy way to update the dictionaries, though...I guess you could add to the custom.dic files for MS Office...
A little research indicates that openoffice and thunderbird use a common "myspell", which is based around a .dic word list, again as a simple text file. So that should be fairly easy to update.
The collecting side likewise shouldn't be too hard - you could effectively spellcheck articles from an RSS, and collect the words it turns up. You may filter so that they have to come up at least twice in a single article, for example, to pass over simple mistakes - although I'm sure the BBC checks their work pretty thoroughly.