Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 17708
"Afterwards" is not in the OpenOffice Spell Check English Dictionary
Last modified: 2013-02-24 20:34:27 UTC
Now I did a search to see if this issue was reported before so hopefully I am not opening a duplicate bug. If I am this is my first post so bare with me. I was writing a document in OpenOffice and went to do the spell check feature. It highlight "Afterwards" as being a misspelled word. It gave me the following alternative spellings: Afterward Afterwords After wards Afterward s Since none of these fit the word I needed I went to Dictionary.com to see if I had the correct spelling because I never heard of the word "Afterwords." Below are two links for the words I searched for on Dictionary.com: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=Afterwards http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=Afterwords With “Afterwards” the search netted 3 entries from American Heritage Dictionary, Webster's Dictionary and WordNet Dictionary of Princeton University. All three dictionaries reaffirmed that there is a word “Afterwards.” Both Netscape 7.1 and Microsoft Office spell checkers did not report “Afterwards” as misspelled either. With “Afterwords” the search netted only 1 entry from American Heritage Dictionary. The entry was actually “Afterword” without the “s” and had a definition of “See epilogue.” On the other hand, both Netscape 7.1 and Microsoft Office spell checkers did report “Afterwords” and “Afterword” as misspelled. So this tells me that the words that should have been displayed in the spell check dialog are as follows: Afterward Afterwards After wards Afterward s Instead of what was observed by me which is the following: Afterward Afterwords After wards Afterward s To summarize, “Afterwords” is not a word in the English dictionary while “Afterwards” is. Therefore, the removal of “Afterwords” is necessary from OpenOffice's dictionary. There also needs to be the inclusion of “Afterwards” in its place. I do not know if the addition of “Afterword” is necessary since I could only find one source from American Heritage for that. I will leave that decision to your discretion. I know this is very fine detail we are talking about here and it might sound like I am being picky but I just want OpenOffice to be the best Office Suite available. I hope this fix can be put into OpenOffice 1.1 before it becomes final as I would think it should be a simple, easy fix. I think it would look bad and very amateurish if OpenOffice 1.1 Final says a correctly spelled word is incorrectly spelled and in turn suggests replacement with a word that is not spelled correctly. Thanks for your consideration.
Hi, Thanks for filing this issue. Please let the developers decide whether it's feasible to investigate (and eventually fix) the issue for 1.1. I reset the Target Milestone to "not determined". Thanks, Stefan
Hi, Thanks for your bug report. I checked my hardcopy dictionaries and they both say that "afterward" is correct but that "afterwards" is incorrect. But ... based on the links you sent "afterwards" is now considered "an adverbial form" (whatever that is ;-) So I will do my best to update the en_US wordlist before the final release of OOo 1.1 and if I miss it I will add "afterwards" to the user downloadable version just so that you can upgrade yourself until the fix appears. Thanks again for your bug report. Kevin
Hi, Okay I just commit a fix to the en_US.dic file in cws_srx645_ooo11rc3 so it should appear in OOo 1.1 final. The word afterword was actually a typo (an l got dropped). The real term should have been "afterworld" and not "afterword". The correct fix was to change the following afterward afterword/MS to be afterward/S afterworld/MS You can actually test this for me by using any text editor to edit the file: share/dict/ooo/en_US.dic and simply change the lines as above and nothing else. You should be good to go. That change should make it into the final OOo 1.1 release so I am resolving this as fixed. Thanks for your bug report. Kevin
> The real term should have been "afterworld" and not "afterword". Well, at least the word after word exists: afterword •n. a concluding section in a book, typically by a person other than the author. The Concise Oxford Dictionary. OUP 2001. And the OED (2nd ed.) says: afterword [f. AFTER- 9, after foreword.] A passage added at the end of a book, etc., as an epilogue or the like. Regarding how frequent this word is, http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/cgi-bin/en/wort_www.exe?site=2&Wort_id=10447149 says it that "the" is 2^20 times more frequent. This makes it more frequent than the word "afterworld" (2^22). afterworld •n. a world entered after death. COD after-world [AFTER- 6.] 1. A future generation; posterity. 2. A world after death. Therefore I vote for (re)adding the word "afterword"
I thought "afterworld" was simply a typo for "afterword". As I notice, the issue is that the dictionary should have "afterword" and "afterwards" and NOT "afterwords". As for "afterworld", it belongs somewhere else.
That's partly correct Robert. The problems I noticed were the following: 1.“Afterwards” IS a word but IS NOT in the OO dictionary. 2.“Afterwords” IS NOT a word but IS in the OO dictionary. 3.“Afterword” might be a word, as I found one source, but left that for the developers to decide whether to put it in the OO dictionary. Here's what I understand from Kevin's comments and playing with the dictionary file: 1.Words are defined in the OO dictionary in singular format with a “/S” attached at the end if it also has a plural spelling. 2.To solve my first problem which was that “afterwards” was not in the dictionary all Kevin had to do in the dictionary file is add a “/S” to “afterward” (i.e. “afterward/S”). 3.My second problem had to do with the entry “afterword/MS” being a typo of “afterworld/MS”. This meant that both “afterword” and “afterwords” would be considered correct spellings in the OO dictionary instead of the intention of “afterworld” and “afterworlds” being correct. 4.The above two fixes of course leaves out the word “afterword” from the OO dictionary which I think Tobias is complaining about. Tobias might need to open another issue to argue the justification of his claim that “afterword” should be included in the OO dictionary since this bug is already marked fixed. From his earlier comment I think he might have a valid argument though.
To Kevin, I have tested your fix as you asked and it works perfectly. Thank you for all your help and quick resolution of this issue so the fix could go into OOo 1.1 final. This was my first bug report for OOo and I must say I am very impressed and satisfied by the experience and prompt response/fix. Keep up the good work guys. -M P.S. Should the Target Milestone be set to OOo 1.1 instead of not determined?
The Issue you raised has been marked as 'Resolved' and not updated within the last 1 year+. I am therefore setting this issue to 'Verified' as the first step towards Closing it. If you feel this is incorrect, please re-open the issue and add any comments. Many thanks, Andrew Cleaning-up and Closing old Issues ~ The Grand Bug Squash, pre v3 ~ http://marketing.openoffice.org/3.0/announcementbeta.html
As per previous posting: Verified -> Closed. A Closed Issue is a Happy Issue (TM). Regards, Andrew