DOKK / manpages / debian 12 / enchant-2 / enchant-2.1.en
ENCHANT-2(1) General Commands Manual ENCHANT-2(1)

Enchant - a spellchecker

enchant-2 -a|-l|-h|-v [-L] [-d DICTIONARY] [FILE]

Enchant is an ispell-compatible spellchecker.

use the given dictionary
use the given personal wordlist
list suggestions in ispell pipe mode format
list only the misspellings
display line numbers
display help and exit
display version information and exit

Enchant uses global and per-user ordering files named enchant.ordering to decide which spelling provider to use for particular languages. The per-user file takes precedence.

The ordering file takes the form language_tag:<comma-separated list of spelling providers>. The language tag is an IETF BCP 47 language tag, typically of the form COUNTRY_LANGUAGE. To see what dictionaries are available, run enchant-lsmod-2. '*' is used to mean "use this ordering for all languages, unless instructed otherwise." For example:

*:aspell,hunspell,nuspell
en:aspell,hunspell,nuspell
en_GB:hunspell,nuspell,aspell
fr:hunspell,nuspell,aspell

Enchant looks in the following places for files, in decreasing order of precedence:

(If the environment variable is set.)
Default: ~/.config/enchant
Default: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\enchant
/usr/share/enchant
(Or the equivalent location relative to the enchant library for a relocatable build.)

Dictionaries are looked for in a subdirectory with the same name as the provider; for example, /usr/share/enchant/hunspell and ~/.config/enchant/hunspell.

Some providers may also look in a standard system directory for their dictionaries; the hunspell provider can be configured to do so at build time.

aspell(1), enchant-lsmod-2(1)

Written by Dom Lachowicz and Reuben Thomas.