We discuss the facilities in base R for spell checking via Aspell, Hunspell or Ispell, which are useful in particular for conveniently checking the spelling of natural language texts in package Rd files and vignettes. Spell checking performance is illustrated using the Rd files in package stats. This example clearly indicates the need for a domain-specific statistical dictionary. We analyze the results of spell checking all Rd files in all CRAN packages and show how these can be employed for building such a dictionary.
Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".
For attribution, please cite this work as
Hornik & Murdoch, "The R Journal: Watch Your Spelling!", The R Journal, 2011
BibTeX citation
@article{RJ-2011-014,
author = {Hornik, Kurt and Murdoch, Duncan},
title = {The R Journal: Watch Your Spelling!},
journal = {The R Journal},
year = {2011},
note = {https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2011-014},
doi = {10.32614/RJ-2011-014},
volume = {3},
issue = {2},
issn = {2073-4859},
pages = {22-28}
}