Vim cannot find medical spell files

Question

Problem specification

I would love to have a medical spell dictionary in vim. Currently, I have a lot of medical terms in my own personal English dictionary right now. However, using an official medical dictionary would be a superior solution.

What I tried

So I tried adding the following to my vimrc:

set spelllang=en_us,nl,medical

This line of code comes directly from the vim documentation.
It is findable under :help spl. (vim version 8.1).

I restarted vim and I got a message that it was not installed.

To resolve this, I ran :set spell to interactively down the spelling files.
No luck on that:

:set spell
Cannot find spell file for "medical" in utf-8
Do you want me to try downloading it? Y

Downloading medical.utf-8.spl...
:!curl 'http://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/runtime/spell/medical.utf-8.spl' -L -o '/tmp/vYgP5zs/4.spl'
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
"/tmp/vYgP5zs/4.spl" 9 lines, 314 character 
Could not find it, trying medical.ascii.spl...
:!curl 'http://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/runtime/spell/medical.ascii.spl' -L -o '/tmp/vYgP5zs/4.spl'
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
"/tmp/vYgP5zs/4.spl" 9 lines, 314 character 
Sorry, downloading failed
Warning: Cannot find word list "medical.utf-8.spl" or "medical.ascii.spl"

So I tried searching the relevant ftp.vim.org link, and indeed there are not listed there.

What is an alternative route to installing these medical spelling files?

Answer 1

The "medical" spell file does not exist, it is just an example of a name that is longer than two characters. You would have to generate one yourself.

Answer 2

In response to Bram's answer, I have found, modified, and compiled a medical spell file that can be used with Vim.

I've made the full instructions and the source code available under a GPL3 license over here. However, I'll provide an abbreviated guide to installing the medical spell file here too.

How to install a medical spell file for vim

Step 1: On a Linux machine, the medical spell file can be downloaded as follows:

curl "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/melvio/medical-spell-files/main/spell/medical.utf-8.spl" --output "${HOME}/.vim/spell/medical.utf-8.spl"

Step 2: Add the medical dictionary to your vimrc. For example, by adding:

set spellang=en_us,medical

Step 3: Start your happy Vimming. Is your spell checking disabled by default? You can enable it by running the following command in vim:

:set spell

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Found any issues? Feel free to edit my post and/or send me a PR/issue over here.

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Thanks again Bram Moolenaar for providing the correct answer. And, thank you @D. Ben Knoble for providing me with the solution:

You may be able to download a plain-text version of an actual medical dictionary or spelling list and use vim +:mkspell to create the files.