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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?
But this is a great idea for a collaborative, freely available project. I'm a mathematician by trade and have run into a similar problem. Want to work together?
After all, I am strangely colored.
Beyond that...the textbook is always a good choice. Type it, check it a few times, and then add it to the dictionary. :)
Goo goo g'joob.
I am finishing up a BS in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and have battled this throughout my collegiate years as well. I have searched long and far for a solution and have thus far not found anything. I have come across a few medical versions but even they tend to be for the lay person. One solution (somewhat) has been http://wikipedia.com/. I know this is not a dictionary but works if you need to double check a spelling, but mainly I have found it useful while writing scientific pieces to double check a few pathways or cell types. While its not comprehensive by any means, it is coming along at a suprisingly great rate. On a quick note... The Cell (which can be found at NCBI website) is a good book reference for such purposes as is Voet and Voet's Biochemistry.
my site of misleading and incorrect information!
The last time I played w/ spellcheckers, the 'soundex' function was tops. It basically mapped phonetic sounds to values and summed them.
The problem w/ scientific terms is that the rules and patterns that compose a soundex value don't hold up wo complex words.
The same approach may possibly be taken, but the patterns and values will need to refined/redefined.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
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.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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.
I know this isn't an autmated solution, but whenever I need to know how to spell a scientific word, I use Google Scholar. I take a guess at the spelling, search for it, and google will often prompt me with the correct spelling. If I get thousands of hits but all happen to be wrong then hey, at least I'm spelling the word the same way thousands of others have :)
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.
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
I've used medical dictionaries in the past. Stedmens is probably the most well known -- and make their dictionaries available in digital form for import into Word, etc. They also have legal and some other terms. http://www.stedmans.com/category.cfm/210
Slashdot hid what looked like HTML, lets try that again:
xargs -n1 echo < TheBook.txt | sort | uniq > dictionary.txt
This page has an interesting list (of plant names) http://www.bgbm.org/IAPT/Nomenclature/Code/SaintLo uis/0118IndexScfNames.htm
but isn't great for building a dictionary because it includes way -not- to spell words!
Standardized Nomenclature of Medicine, Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT) is a medical group struggling with the same issues. They don't seem to provide any kind of dictionaries, either. http://www.snomed.org/about/index.html
1, How about you have a website where people upload their private dictionaries (with a language option too??). This shouldn't be too hard using the OOo files as they are presumably XML, might be quite server intensive though. Strip the words and tabulate them (add them to a (pgsql?) database) - you can throw any away that you have enough of or that have already been rejected as misspellings (sp?!?).
... so a dictionary request could be limited by subject field too.
...
.aff or .dic formats.]
If a word appears with the same spelling in 100 (or downloaders preference) dictionaries then it is tagged for inclusion in the master dictionary.
Uploaders could specify the general area they write in as well as the language, eg Physical Sciences, Literature, Agriculture,
Require a dictionary upload _OR_ payment of a fee to avoid freeloaders.
2,
3, Profit ??!
[PS: I just looked and OOo uses