A Spell-Checker for Scientific Terms?

deaflamb wonders: "I'm a biology major and have been writing a paper for a class. I'm using Microsoft Word on my mac. It's annoying me how often I have to click 'ignore' or 'add' on the spell checker when it comes across words only used in Science. Was wondering if there where any free scientific spell checkers out there that can be added into Word or OpenOffice (since I use that too), and how well they work?" It didn't take me long to find these guys, who look like they cover a significant portion of the terms used in the medical and science world, however, their price for a single user license for only one of their specialty packs can run into the hundreds of dollars. Might there be other options that are a bit more affordable or, as the deaflamb asks, free?

Comments

Just suck it up...

[Otter]

Realistically, you only use a tiny subset of scientific vocabulary. OK, as an undergrad you face more breadth than a researcher does, but still.

Just suck it up. Add words to your dictionary as you go, and within a month you'll rarely see those squiggly red lines. For some reason, people are too intimidated to just start into it.

Pubmed

[virology-not for com]

I had this idea a while ago. Probably every science major does. Anyways, dictionary files are simple, just the word followed by an endline. So all you need is a good database. A good one for biology is pubmed over at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=P ubMed&itool=toolbar They offer a way to download all their abstracts. Most are spell checked, and they should, in culmination, include most every biological word. So, download their abstracts (i think they are in xml) parse them (delete duplicates and words in a normal dictionary... maybe words with numbers) and put them into a txt file followed by an endline. Done.

Backup your dictionary!!!

[Lifix]

I can't tell you how few people remember to backup their dictionary when they backup a computer. I worked as an intern in the IT department at my school and tech savy faculty members would regularly loose 3+ years of work on a custom dictionary because they failed to back it up. I suggest you just struggle through, and add all the words to the dictionary, but remember to keep a copy somewhere.

The ability to customize your dictionary is something that most people in the tech world don't talk about much, but I use it every day of my life: by day I work at a computer retail store, but at night and on the weekends I'm a writer and a custom dictionary keeps me from screwing up proper nouns that I am using.

Re:build one from existing texts

[GiMP]

Slashdot hid what looked like HTML, lets try that again:

xargs -n1 echo < TheBook.txt | sort | uniq > dictionary.txt