Common words missing from typical spellcheckers

Question

I find the spellcheckers included with most software to be woefully inadequate.

Many common words are not included in your typical spellchecker.

For example, try spellchecking these common words:

• superset
• formulary
• voicemails
• analytics
• customizations

Most spellcheckers will claim that a majority of those common words are erroneous.

Is there an open data source of words commonly missing from spellcheckers?

Note that I'm not looking for a massive list with every corporation and product name. I'm looking for a simple list of words similar to the above five examples. I don't know how many common words are missing from most spellcheckers, but I would imagine a list of about 50-500 words will be adequate.

Answer 1

I don't know about a single list that would do what you're looking for, but the Oxford English Dictionary posts a 'new words list' a few times a year. They have back to March 2000 posted online.

Many of the OED 'new words' are compound words or new senses (meanings for existing terms), so they may not result in a need to add a 'new word' for a spelling dictionary.

Answer 2

I had not previously known about the Brigham Young Corpus of Contemporary American English and its companion, wordfrequency.info. Only their 5000 word list is offered at no cost, and that seems to be lacking the words you seek, so it's a near-miss for this website, but it still seems useful enough to mention, especially because the costs are not exorbitant.

Also note that FreeBSD distributions (including Mac OS) include a words file (on Mac OS, look at /usr/share/dict/words) it has some but not all of the words in your example.

Obviously neither of these are set up specifically to correct for "commonly missing from spellcheckers," but they may still be useful.