McIlroy's "Development of a Spelling List" (1982) paper is doi:10.1109/TCOM.1982.1095395 available at https://web.archive.org/web/20120324185456/http://unix-spell... . I found it from https://code.google.com/archive/p/unix-spell/ , which also says:

> It is interesting to note that one of the world's best compressor (paq8l) can compress the 250kb word list down to 48.5kb, less than the space taken by the lossy compression methods proposed in the paper! For comparison, regular modern compression methods (such as gzip, lzma etc) only achieve twice that size (85-90kb).

Bentley's commentary is in "A Spelling Checker", CACM 28(5): 456-462 (1985), doi:10.1145/3532.315102 , behind the paywall at http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=315102&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID... and in the book "Programming Pearls", Second Edition, according to http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3846 .