{"id":39923,"date":"2004-04-02T06:58:00","date_gmt":"2004-04-02T06:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2004\/04\/02\/why-a-really-large-dictionary-is-not-a-good-thing\/"},"modified":"2004-04-02T06:58:00","modified_gmt":"2004-04-02T06:58:00","slug":"why-a-really-large-dictionary-is-not-a-good-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20040402-00\/?p=39923\/","title":{"rendered":"Why a really large dictionary is not a good thing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes you&#8217;ll see somebody brag about how many words are  in their spell-checking dictionary.  It turns out that having too many words in a spell checker&#8217;s dictionary  is worse than having too few.\n  Suppose you had a spell checker whose  dictionary contained every word in the  <a href=\"http:\/\/dictionary.oed.com\/\">Oxford English Dictionary<\/a>.  Then you hand it this sentence:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>  Therf werre eyght bokes.  <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>  That sentence would pass with flying colors, because all of the  words in the above sentence are valid English words, though  most people would be hard-pressed to provide definitions.\n  The English language has so many words that if you included them all,  then common typographical errors would often match (by coincidence)  a valid English word and therefore not be detected by the spell checker.  Which would go against the whole point of a spell checker: To catch  spelling errors.\n  So be glad that your spell checker doesn&#8217;t have the largest dictionary  possible.  If it did, it would end up doing a worse job.\n  After I wrote this article, I found  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wintertree-software.com\/spell-check\/dictionary-size.html\">  a nice discussion of the subject of spell check dictionary size  on the Wintertree Software web site<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>  [Raymond is currently on vacation; this message was pre-recorded.]  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes you&#8217;ll see somebody brag about how many words are in their spell-checking dictionary. It turns out that having too many words in a spell checker&#8217;s dictionary is worse than having too few. Suppose you had a spell checker whose dictionary contained every word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then you hand it this sentence: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-39923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Sometimes you&#8217;ll see somebody brag about how many words are in their spell-checking dictionary. It turns out that having too many words in a spell checker&#8217;s dictionary is worse than having too few. Suppose you had a spell checker whose dictionary contained every word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then you hand it this sentence: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39923\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}