[Hunspell-devel] Request for very useful feature: rare words

[Bram M. <Br...@mo...>]

I have been discussing the Dutch word list with the people that maintain
it.  Problem is that there are quite a few words that are valid Dutch
words, but at the same time common errors for often used words.
They would like to remove the words from the list, but that has the
problem of flagging words as an error while they are actually valid
words.  This lowers the confidence that users have in the word list.

The solution I made in Vim is to add a flag that indicates rare words.
The flag is obviously called RARE.

This is very useful.  The first step to support it is to allow it in the
.aff file.  Dictionary maintainers can the start using it.  The next
step is to handle the words differently.  How is up to the UI.  The most
common method is to use a different highlight color.

All this is very easy to implement, it's just a matter of small changes
to the documentation, code and interfaces.


This is the Vim documentation for the flag:

RARE WORDS						*spell-RARE*

In the affix file a RARE line can be used to define the affix name used for
rare words.  Example:

	RARE ? ~

Rare words are highlighted differently from bad words.  This is to be used for
words that are correct for the language, but are hardly ever used and could be
a typing mistake anyway.  When the same word is found as good it won't be
highlighted as rare.

This flag can also be used on an affix, so that a basic word is not rare but
the basic word plus affix is rare |spell-affix-flags|.  However, if the word
also appears as a good word in another way (e.g., in another region) it won't
be marked as rare.


-- 
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