British spellng in ispell

Support & Help Requests
#1

The man page for ispell indicates that to get British (as opposed to American) spelling I should use the syntax ispell -d british .

When I tried this I got the error:

Can't open /usr/lib/ispell/british.hash

and indeed there is no file “british.hash” in /usr/lib/ispell.

I have checked that I have an up-to-date version of the ispell package, and have google around (futilely, endlessly, frustratedly) for information as to how or whence I can get the file british.hash. Lots of Google hits, nothing that seems to be relevant. (Lots of stuff about Emacs, which I don’t use. I just want to use ispell in a stand-alone manner.)

Can anyone point me in the right direction? I am using Mate 1.12.1 under Ubuntu 16.04.2, if that is of any relevance.

#2

Hi @rolf, Just a quick one.

I’ve never installed or used ispell but assume you’ve installed one of the British packages? I see several like ibritish, ibritish-small, ibritish-huge, etc.

#3

Thanks for trying to help me. But to respond to your assumption …

Well, no. It was not (at all!) clear to me that this was what was required.
However, thanks to your prompting, I tried such installation:

sudo apt-get install ibritish-huge

That seemed to run without problem. But then I tried:

ispell -d british <filename>

and got exactly the same error as before. There must be something else
that I need to do. Can anyone enlighten me as to what?