While the current spell check works fine it often flags words that are spelled totally fine.
For example: synergized, unfixable, numbingly, supremes (plural of supreme), frightenedly, moanings, beamingly, good-natured…
Is there a better version of English dictionary that I could use?
What’s frightenedly?
Why do you want to qualify absolutes such as supreme?
Add them to your dictionary if you wish, but please don’t inflict them on me.
frightenedly
In a frightened manner.
One person is a supreme, what are a group of people, each of them supreme? Aren’t they supremes?
I did add them but there are many of the words missing.
Don’t play the victim card. Those words are real English words and you might benefit from learning a few more words. Besides it’s not like you would even notice if the dictionary was updated with new words.
Nope. They are peers. Anyway, supreme is an adjective, adjectives don’t have a plural form, the noun it is associated with uses a plural if needed
You can contribute to proofingtool: Getting Involved
" OpenOffice/LibreOffice/Mozilla:
— British Dictionary
If you find a word that appears as a typo, and you are sure it isn’t, please e-mail it to me for analysis. If it exists in dictionaries such as Oxford or Collins, I will add it.
Please share your private wordlist if you feel there are very basic/common words missing."
Never mind then, looks like asking questions here is only to be mocked.
Well, I’m not mocking you, but frightenedly is not in the Oxford English Dictionary.
(Yes, I’m a native UK English speaker.)
I’m using US English. Also the word is here:
Why does it matter if you’re a native UK English speaker? It makes your opinion more important?
Besides, other words aren’t in the dictionary either?
Btw, supreme in my case is a level of power which is just one of the many levels and not he final one so in that case it can be supremes.
Isn’t this supposed to be ask for and maybe get a solution and not a debate on English language?
I an sorry if you thought I was mocking, I was just trying to defend against some of your criticism of the dictionary. Dictionaries must be accurate if they are to assist and not to deceive.
I also provided a link for you to help improve the dictionary.
I add words to my user dictionary, but always with careful consideration. Cheers, Al
Hmm, if supreme is not above all others then it is being used incorrectly
Not everybody thinks so.
And sometimes you only get an explanation, why you don’t get a solution.
Often we have to query important information, before the rout to an anwer is clear. You just assumed everybody will understand you search for us-english…
For you: LibreOffice uses hunspell dictionaries. So you may use any dictionary you can get or convert in hunspell. I can’t help to differ between english dictionaries, as I’m non-native in all english variants.
So you have to search yourself
The plural Supremes seems to be used for the singers only. As such, it’s the name of a band. Names don’t have to follow rules of grammar or logic, so such a name is fine. I have considerable problems with words like “frightenedly” - they seem to pop up in (machine?, see frightenedly in a sentence - frightenedly sentence) translations from Chinese and such, and I wonder if native speakers of English would ever use them. But that’s more a matter for debate on an entirely different platform. I agree with earnestAI that if you want to have something special in your dictionary, you can add it yourself. Why force it on other people by having it included in standard dictionaries?
Continuing theme from Floris_v there was a question about how to create and add your own custom dictionary from a word list Does there exist a way to create a dictionary file from a list or document? The list is added as additional words to the standard dictionary. Searching should find other questions related to creating custom dictionaries. You can then transfer your custom list from computer to computer in future.
Cheers, Al
I definitely agree that creating custom dictionaries is much better, and as an L1 speaker of NZE and have above average familiarity with UK/Aus and US English, I’d never come across “frightenedly” before. Some of the other omissions did seem suprising - “moanings” and “good-natured” for example, but almost all those “ly” adverbs listed sounded awkward and unnatural to my ear. Even the OED only has 2 citations for “frightenedly”, both from the late C19. It’s pretty clear that they are not yet fully integrated into the standard register of most English variants, so for now, adding them to one’s own custom dictionary makes sense, I think.
Who’s being condescending or mocking here?
You do not properly understand the difference between a dictionary like the Merriam-Webster and a spell checker dictionary. In the first case, words will be commented, like when they have a certain meaning, sometimes only in one scientific discipline, they can have a plural. In a simple spell checker, that merely tests whether a word appears in a list with known words, no such distinctions are made, and an inexperienced writer might think that a word is spelled correctly, when in fact it isn’t, because in the context of what he’s writing, he uses the word wrongly. Nowadays, lots of Dutch people write stuff like “as optimal as possible”, which is clearly rubbish; you should simply use “as good as possible”.
You are free to use a word in a completely new meaning and modify the spelling - well-known writers like Shaw did just that. But don’t add such new forms to a general spell checker list. You don’t want to get spelling errors not noticed because the spell checker is too liberal.
People come here to ask questions and to get answers. Some just want confirmation of their opinions. Well, if their opinions are correct, we gladly accommodate. When the opinions are wrong, we try to help to get the questioner to see things correctly. Sometimes the questioner then feels condescended on, IMVHO that’s entirely his problem.
@ [EarnestAl]
It’s a translation and not mine, I’m just editing it so I’m not gonna change it.
@ [floris_v]
You are right about it being a translation from Chinesse.
How am I forcing anybody into anything?
I only asked if there is a dictionary that has those words included. I didn’t demand that you use them.
It’s easy to add a few words but by now it’s been more than 30 and I’m sure there will be more. Hence me asking…
@ [Wanderer]
This wasn’t the US vs UK. That would have been easy to solve since I’d just switch to UK English if the translator wanted it that way.
If “frightenedly” only occurs in translations from Chinese, there’s all the more reason to be suspicious. Chinese and English are about as far apart as it gets. It’s amazing what funny and totally wrong translations Google Translate offers for English-Dutch and vice versa as soon as you enter colloquial expressions, and Chinese-English won’t be different. Just because machine translation software offers a word that is well-formed according to the rules for that language, doesn’t mean that it’s a word that feels natural for a native speaker of that language. And remember that you still have to proofread your work. No spell checker will notice it when you enter “loop” instead of “pool”, or “cool” instead of “cook” (a grammar checker would probably spot the second case, though). Take care.
The theme I was continuing, as could be seen from my comment, was entirely about creating a special dictionary.
[floris_v]
I was merely commenting on your “don’t force people…”. Nobody forced you into anything. Nobody even asked you to do anything and yet you say I’m forcing this on people like I’m attacking you or others.
"as optimal as possible” can be used to convey the importance of optimizing so it’s not like there is no use case. Similar to “more perfect”. Perfect obviously can’t be more perfect but in real world there is no perfect so “more perfect” can simply mean to put in more effort to make it better. You obviously wouldn’t use it in official documents but in a fantasy book or everyday conversation I don’t see a problem.
Isn’t a dictionary a list with known words? Sure, Merriam-Webster has the definitions etc but it still has words that the spellcheck dictionary doesn’t and a spellcheck flagging a word that is correctly spelled is not a mistake?
It’s a human translator, they aren’t a professional since they are doing it as a hobby and probably using a tool like Google translate. Unlike a pure machine translation this is decent. There are some strange things like this. Translator likes to add verbs in a row a lot and loves adding …ly or …ed to words. Like frightenedly or casted or bursted. I don’t know how much is because of the original work and how much is the translator’s style.
I am reading it but if I miss stuff then oh well. This is only for me anyway.
[EarnestAl]
Adding the words to the existing US English dictionary will be a problem?
I don’t want to start over since I’m at 384k words now.
Actually, it is - which really surprised me.
Derivatives
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@Johnsmith309123: You seem to put more trust in spell checkers than you should. As soon as you enter a word in a dictionary used for spell checking, when people type that word by accident, the spell checker won’t warn them for it anymore. It will assume that it’s correctly spelled. There are many words in Dutch where you can swap two letters and get another correctly spelled Dutch word, but with a very different meaning. So you can enter “brood” when you wanted to enter “boord”, both correctly spelled Dutch nouns. The spell checker doesn’t notice it, because it’s correctly spelled. The point that the contributors in this discussion want to make is that you have to be careful with the words that you add to a spell check dictionary, because once they’re added, the spell checker will skip them, even when they’re wrongly used. Add the words that you want to a dictionary used by a large number of people, and many people get a dictionary with words that they might want to be warned against. But they won’t. That’s why I say that you force something on people: once added to a general dictionary, people are forced to accept their presence.
I know a little about how spell check dictionaries for hunspell and the like are built, and trust me, it’s hard work. You won’t do that much work for ten or even a hundred people, it’s not worth the effort. When you want something almost exclusively for yourself, you should just add those words to your private dictionary, that’s what it’s for. Professional doctors, geologists and others who use lots of technical jargon, don’t expect developers of general dictionaries to add their jargon, they buy custom dictionaries with their jargon instead, or keep adding their terminology to custom dictionaries.
In English, that’s “Fearfully”