• make cspell reports unknown words. After verifying the reported words are correct you should add them to files under dictfiles directory.
• cspell target assumes the names used in ctags source code are correctly spelled. Such names can be added semi-automatically; use make dicts targets. It updates files prefixed with GENERATED- under dictfiles.
• Either semi-automatically generated or adding by manually, files under dictfiles directory should be installed to Universal-ctags git repository.
• make cspell makes and users SPELL_CHECKING.TMP at the top of source code directory as temporary working space.
• cspell target depends on GNU aspell library. If the library is linked to, ctags --list-features prints aspell.

An example session:

$ make cspell
./misc/gen-repoinfo > main/repoinfo.h
  CC       main/ctags-repoinfo.o
  CCLD     ctags
/bin/sh misc/cspell
checking bda36b226cfc0f492908bc5779268c353e615623...unknown words
        orignal
        dictfile
checking 61a71ef37df9fd9ebb0d3e8a941effd643662cda...ok
checking b08c956e155d47a8e689cfede2501ab48890c889...ok
checking c07a6e94140e1d5cfeaf3cb42d2fc28bd0e92e51...ok
...
checking 201e5e774fef84527802113969998bd71b14466d...ok
Makefile:6510: recipe for target 'cspell' failed
make: *** [cspell] Error 1

Here cspell reports "orignal" and "dictfile" as unknown words.

"orignal" should be "original". So you should make a fixup commit for bda36b with "git commit --fixup=bda36b". Then you may want to do "git rebase -i --autosquash master".

"dictfile" may be a name used in source code files. Ideally make dicts picks up the name and puts to one of GENERATED- dictionaries. However, it is not implemented yet. What you can do now is adding it to one of dictionaries under dictfiles directory. After do "git add" the directory file and make a fixup commit.

There are cases that you want to add a misspelled word intentionally to source tree: to test cases(Units and Tmain) and to documentations.

About test cases, make a file named dictfile under the directory of target test case, and put the words line by line. You can find an example in Units/simple-ctags-aspell.d/dictfile of Universal-ctags source tree.

For documentations, there is no good way. Suggestions are welcome. "CSPELL:" prefix line is a temporary solution. A line starting from "CSPELL:" in a commit log is treated specially by make cspell when spell-checking the commit; whitespace separated words in the line are added to a temporary dictionary.

An example

commit 8efb57fa1c9d7b9b7ba01f49963d7d7779609f21
Author: Masatake YAMATO <yamato@redhat.com>
Date:   Mon Jun 5 23:08:51 2017 +0900

docs(man): fix styles of definition list

CSPELL: xno xyes

Signed-off-by: Masatake YAMATO <yamato@redhat.com>

Here "xno" and "xyes" are added to a dictionary temporary used during spell-checking the commit, "8efb57"; "xno" and "xyes" are never reported as unknown words. The temporary dictionary is used only for this commit.