6 replies to this topic

[Paul Ingraham]

I have a significant need for both medical and Canadian spellings, simultaneously. That is, I’m writing about medical science in Canadian English.

(I’m not concerned with the difference between US/Canadian medical spellings.)

For a long time I got by with a giant compiled words file of medical terminology that I cooked up a few years ago. But it sucks. It has many errors in it, and is generally completely outclassed by the Lex version of US English Medical Spellings. It appears that I cannot use the US English Medical Spellings while checking in Canadian English, and vice versa. They are mutually exclusive. This really sucks for me.

("OpenMedSpel U.S. English.compiled" an extension to Lex reference, I think, and it is also restricted to US English.)

Are there any workarounds for this problem? I'd even be happy to throw money at this problem, if there's a reference somewhere that I can buy. But I haven't a clue where to find that.

[Evan Gross]

Paul Ingraham, on Jan 21 2010, 01:16 AM, said:

I have a significant need for both medical and Canadian spellings, simultaneously. That is, I’m writing about medical science in Canadian English.

(I’m not concerned with the difference between US/Canadian medical spellings.)

For a long time I got by with a giant compiled words file of medical terminology that I cooked up a few years ago. But it sucks. It has many errors in it, and is generally completely outclassed by the Lex version of US English Medical Spellings. It appears that I cannot use the US English Medical Spellings while checking in Canadian English, and vice versa. They are mutually exclusive. This really sucks for me.

("OpenMedSpel U.S. English.compiled" an extension to Lex reference, I think, and it is also restricted to US English.)

Are there any workarounds for this problem? I'd even be happy to throw money at this problem, if there's a reference somewhere that I can buy. But I haven't a clue where to find that.

Sure, make a new Compiled Learned Words file (File > New > Compiled Learned Words), assign it to Canadian English. Then open the OpenMedSpel reference, Select All, and either copy and paste or drag and drop the entire contents into the new Canadian English file. Save, voilà! Now you have a Canadian English version of OpenMedSpel.

Sorry to say, this won't work with the US English Medical Spellings database, though, since you can't see the contents (it's a compressed Proximity file).

[Paul Ingraham]

Evan Gross, on Jan 21 2010, 10:49 PM, said:

Sorry to say, this won't work with the US English Medical Spellings database, though, since you can't see the contents (it's a compressed Proximity file).

Right. Unfortunately, that is a deal-breaker. If I understand the nature of OpenMedSpel correctly, it’s not a complete medical word list in itself, but an extension. The description for it reads: “This reference contains over 35,000 medical terms not available in the U.S. English Medical Additional Spellings database. Use this file in conjunction with the standard U.S. English Medical Spellings for a grand total of nearly 60,000 medical terms!” So it’s missing every term in the main Medical spellings reference. Which is not good.

Unless that’s incorrect, it won’t do. I need something else. Is the Us Medical Spellings database truly tied to US English? There’s no way it can be used with Cdn English? It’s just a database of words! It’s hard to understand why I’m not allowed to use it. So close ... yet so far ... right there ... but unuseable without sacrificing Cdn spelling. It just seems deeply wrong.

[Evan Gross]

Paul Ingraham, on Jan 22 2010, 12:10 AM, said:

Right. Unfortunately, that is a deal-breaker. If I understand the nature of OpenMedSpel correctly, it’s not a complete medical word list in itself, but an extension. The description for it reads: “This reference contains over 35,000 medical terms not available in the U.S. English Medical Additional Spellings database. Use this file in conjunction with the standard U.S. English Medical Spellings for a grand total of nearly 60,000 medical terms!” So it’s missing every term in the main Medical spellings reference. Which is not good.

Unless that’s incorrect, it won’t do. I need something else. Is the Us Medical Spellings database truly tied to US English? There’s no way it can be used with Cdn English? It’s just a database of words! It’s hard to understand why I’m not allowed to use it. So close ... yet so far ... right there ... but unuseable without sacrificing Cdn spelling. It just seems deeply wrong.

Oh yeah - forgot about that.

Guess what I should do is make a Canadian English version from the OpenMedSpel full word list, with nothing pruned out. Not sure if I can do that tonight, but won't take me long.

As far as tweaking the US Medical spellings database so Proximity think's it's for Canadian English - I know how to do it, but I think it would be bad for me to modify their property like that.

The OpenMedSpel with nothing removed seems like the way to go here.

[Evan Gross]

Evan Gross, on Jan 22 2010, 12:18 AM, said:

The OpenMedSpel with nothing removed seems like the way to go here.

Actually, seems I have this already - at least here, on my machine.

Thing is, it's still not going to amount to the same thing as US English Medical Spellings (from Proximity) + OpenMedSpel (w/dups removed), as the number of removed duplicates was about 11,000.

BUT I see some other files hanging around related to this OpenMedSpel stuff, let me look at them and see what's up.

[Evan Gross]

Paul Ingraham, on Jan 22 2010, 12:10 AM, said:

Right. Unfortunately, that is a deal-breaker. If I understand the nature of OpenMedSpel correctly, it’s not a complete medical word list in itself, but an extension. The description for it reads: “This reference contains over 35,000 medical terms not available in the U.S. English Medical Additional Spellings database. Use this file in conjunction with the standard U.S. English Medical Spellings for a grand total of nearly 60,000 medical terms!” So it’s missing every term in the main Medical spellings reference. Which is not good.

Unless that’s incorrect, it won’t do. I need something else. Is the Us Medical Spellings database truly tied to US English? There’s no way it can be used with Cdn English? It’s just a database of words! It’s hard to understand why I’m not allowed to use it. So close ... yet so far ... right there ... but unuseable without sacrificing Cdn spelling. It just seems deeply wrong.

Well, OpenMedSpel IS a complete word list. It's just that the one I posted has duplicates removed.

The Canadian English one I have here has about 44,000 words in it. But like I said, there are some unique words in Proximity's database that aren't in the OpenMedSpel list.

But 44,000 is better than 35,000. Not as good as the US English situation, but still useful. Ya think?

[Paul Ingraham]

Evan Gross, on Jan 22 2010, 12:55 AM, said:

But 44,000 is better than 35,000. Not as good as the US English situation, but still useful. Ya think?

Yes! ;-) Considerably better than what I have now. I’d be annoyed in principle that it’s not as good as the Proximity database for US English. But it probably be pretty serviceable. Thanks for your work on this. And how do I obtain this list ...? Will you be posting it?