Re: Aspell uses a common English user dictionary for AE and BE

On Fri, 16 May 2008, Florian v. Savigny wrote:

> I am a bit puzzled by aspell's behaviour regarding my personal
> dictionary. I am using aspell through Emacs' user interface, which
> passes it either "-d british", or "-d american", according to its own
> documentation. While in itself, this does make the expected difference
> (if I choose "british", spellings like "rationalise" will be OK; if I
> choose "american", they will not), it seems to maintain only one
> common English user dictionary (i.e. for both AE and BE). The latter
> is called .aspell.en.pws and is updated with new words regardless of
> whether I have chosen "british" or "american".

Unfortunately this is a design choice I made that is not easy to fix. 
Arguments can be made either way.  The basic problem is that while 
"british" and "american" are separate dictionaries they are technically the 
same language "en" as seen by Aspell and personal dictionaries names are 
based on language, not the dictionary.  One think you can do is to 
explicitly set the personal or "-d" config option. Like so
   aspell -d british -p .aspell.en_GB.pws