The _B and _C OPTIONS control how ispell handles run-together words, such as notthe for not the. If _B is specified, such words will be considered errors, and ispell will list variations with an inserted blank or hyphen as possible replacements. If _C is specified, run-together words will be considered to be legal compounds, so long as both components are in the dictionary, and each component is at least as long as a language-dependent minimum (three characters, by default). This is useful for languages such as German and Norwegian, where many compound words are formed by concatenation. (Note that compounds formed from three or more root words will still be considered errors). The default for this option is language-dependent; in a multilingual installation, the default may vary depending on which dictionary you choose.

The _P and _m OPTIONS control when ispell automatically generates suggested root/affix combinations for possible addition to your personal dictionary. (These are the entries in the "guess" list that are preceded by question marks.) If _P is specified, such guesses are displayed only if ispell cannot generate any possibilities that match the current dictionary. If _m is specified, such guesses are always displayed. This can be useful if the dictionary has a limited word list, or a word list with few suffixes. However, you should be careful when using this option, as it can generate guesses that produce illegal words. The default for this option is controlled by the dictionary file used.

The _S option suppresses ispell's normal behavior of sorting the list of possible replacement words. Some people may prefer this, since it somewhat enhances the probability that the correct word will be low-numbered.

The _d option is used to specify an alternate hashed dictionary file, other than the default. If the filename does not contain a /, the library directory for the default dictionary file is prefixed; thus, to use a dictionary in the local directory -d ./xxx.hash must be used. This is useful to allow dictionaries for alternate languages. Unlike previous versions of ispell, a dictionary of /dev/null is illegal because the dictionary contains the affix table. If you need an effectively empty dictionary, create a one-entry list with an unlikely string (for example, "qqqqq").

The _p option is used to specify an alternate personal dictionary file. If the filename does not begin with /, $HOME is prefixed. Also, the shell variable WORDLIST may be set, which renames the personal dictionary in the same manner. The command line overrides any WORDLIST setting. If neither the _p switch nor the WORDLIST ENVIRONMENT variable is given, ispell will search for a personal dictionary in both the current directory and $HOME, creating one in $HOME if none is found. The preferred name is constructed by appending .ispell to the base name of the hash file. For example, if you use the English dictionary, your personal dictionary would be named .ispell_english. However, if the file .ispell_words exists, it will be used as the personal dictionary regardless of the language hash file chosen. This feature is included primarily for backwards compatibility.

If the _p option is not specified, ispell will look for personal dictionaries in both the current directory and the home directory. If dictionaries exist in both places, they will be merged. When words are added to the personal dictionary, they will be written to the current directory if a dictionary already existed in that place; otherwise, they will be written to the dictionary in the home directory.

The _w option may be used to specify characters other than alphabetics that may also appear in words. For instance, _w "&" will allow "AT&T" to be picked up. Underscores are useful in many technical documents. There is an admittedly crude provision in this option for 8-bit international characters. Nonprinting characters may be specified in the usual way by inserting a backslash followed by the octal character code, for example, \014 for a form feed. Alternatively, if n appears in the character string, the (up to) three characters following are a decimal code, 0_255, for the character. For example, to include bells and form feeds in your words (an admittedly silly thing to do, but aren't most pedagogical EXAMPLES):

n007n012

Numeric digits other than the three following n are simply numeric characters. Use of n does not conflict with anything because actual alphabetics have no meaning; alphabetics are already accepted. ispell will typically be used with input from a file, meaning that preserving parity for possible 8-bit characters from the input text is okay. If you specify the -l option, and actually type text from the terminal, this may create problems if your stty settings preserve parity.

The _W option may be used to change the length of words that ispell always accepts as legal. Normally, ispell will accept all one-character words as legal, which is equivalent to specifying _W 1. (The default for this switch is actually controlled by the MINWORD installation option, so it may vary at your installation.) If you want all words to be checked against the dictionary, regardless of length, you might want to specify _W 0. On the other hand, if your document specifies to accept all words of three letters or less, then regardless of the setting of this option, ispell will only generate words that are in the dictionary as suggested replacements for words; this prevents the list from becoming too long. Obviously, this option can be very