Not sure if you are being tongue in cheek but.. For example with htdig and other search engines there is a plugin which allows words to be slightly "misspelled". A one character misspelling would match both color and colour. I don't remember but it seems there was also a list of commonly misspelled words, if not one could be made.

Anyway as you suggest it is impossible to solve every case. However please note these are things being created by programmers to do common things. It is not brain surgery. Also it is an old problem. For example BSD's spell command apparently has a -d option to specify a hash of alternate spellings (the hlist file).

Also guess what, dictionaries are published by people who study this sort of thing for a living and they usually note alternative spellings. Even WordNet which has a Perl module has both color and colour. So between currently available resources and software to be developed it does not in fact seem to be as daunting a task as all that. Not that I'm going to do it though! :)

In reply to Re^3: The Björk Situation by mattr
in thread The Björk Situation by SheridanCat

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